Review of Geant4 Applications in Radiobiology

• Main Authors: Sara Mohammadi, Mahdy Ebrahimi, Mohammad Taghi Bahreyni Toossi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Mashhad University of Medical Sciences 2019-07-01
• Series: Iranian Journal of Medical Physics
• Subjects: Monte Carlo Method; Radiobiology; Cell Survival; Relative biological effectiveness; Single Strand Break; Double-Strand Break; Particle Therapy
• Online Access: http://ijmp.mums.ac.ir/article_11281_b353a3cc284428525cd7b8cc095611e5.pdf

Introduction: Ionizing radiation is widely used in industry and medicine; however, it causes a significant health hazard by making microscopic damage to living tissue. Various biological parameters, including cell survival fraction and relative biological effectiveness, are taken into account to assess the severity and extent of biological damages. Microdosimetry suffers from various shortcomings and limitations, but the development of some powerful simulation software has paved the way to resolve these problems in recent years. Material and Methods: In this study, the authors were looked for two keywords (Geant4 and radiobiology) in the title, abstracts, and keywords of Scopus and PubMed database articles. Results: More than 100 articles were found. The researchers extracted the articles that were devoted to the construction of different geometries for DNA, nucleus, and cells as simulate the parameters, such as relative biological effectiveness, SF, linear energy transfer, and single-strand breaks/double-strand breaks in the present study. Conclusion: Geant4 is one of the software commonly used to simulate biological factors. It has many properties, such as the ability to follow up physical processes in very low energy, open source code, and flexibility in complex geometries. In this paper, we reviewed some of the radiobiological parameters simulated with Geant4.