Benchmarking Geant4 hadronic models for prompt-gamma monitoring in carbon ion therapy

摘要

Purpose: The real-time monitoring of the spread-out Bragg peak would allow the planned dose delivered during treatment to be directly verified, but this poses a major challenge in modern ion beam therapy. A possible method to achieve this goal is to exploit the production of secondary particles by the nuclear reactions of the beam with the patient and correlate their emission profile to the planned target volume position. In this study, we present both the production rate and energy spectra of the prompt- produced by the interactions of the C-12 ion beam with a polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) target. We also assess three different Monte Carlo models for prompt-simulation based on our experimental data.