Impact of track structure calculations on biological treatment planning in ion radiotherapy

Treatment planning for ion therapy requires precise knowledge about the biological effectiveness of particle beams, which is strongly determined by the microscopic radial energy deposition around individual ion tracks. We analyse different amorphous track structure models based on simple analytical formulae as well as on radial dose distributions derived by means of Monte Carlo simulations. Moreover, these track structure representations are used as input for the local effect model (LEM) in order to determine their impact on the relative biological effectiveness (RBE) of cell inactivation. It demonstrates the relevance of the inner part of the ion track with a radius of the order of a few nanometres. We show that simple analytical formulae for the radial dose distributions give good results for the prediction of cell inactivation. However, they strongly depend on the assumptions about the local dose in the track core. Additionally, we discuss the interdependence of track structure calculations with other model constituents such as target size and the choice of the biological input data for conventional photon irradiation. 1 Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed. New Journal of Physics 10 (2008) 075005 1367-2630/08/075005+17$30.00 © IOP Publishing Ltd and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft