Influence of Geant4 parameters on dose distribution and computation time for carbon ion therapy simulation
Received 11 September 2009; received in revised form 17 November 2009; accepted 23 December 2009. published online 27 January 2010. Corrected Proof
Abstract
The aim of this work was to study the influence of Geant4 parameters on dose distribution and computational time for simulations of carbon ion therapy. The study was done using Geant4 version 9.0. The dose distribution in water for incident monoenergetic carbon ion beams of 300 MeV/u were compared for different values of secondary particle production threshold and different step limits. Variations of depth dose of about 2 mm were observed in some cases, which induced a 30% variation of dose deposit in the Bragg peak region. Other tests were done using Geant4 version 9.2 to verify the results from this study. The two versions provided converging results and led to the same conclusions.
Corresponding author at: Centre de lutte contre le cancer Léon Bérard, service de Radiothérapie, 28 rue Laennec, 69 373 Lyon Cedex 08, France. Tel.: +33 4 78 78 51 51; fax: +33 4 78 78 59 98.
ABSTRACT