RADIATION TRANSPORT CODES FOR POTENTIAL APPLICATIONS RELATED TO RADIOBIOLOGY AND RADIOTHERAPY USING PROTONS, NEUTRONS, AND NEGATIVELY CHARGED PIONS

摘要

In connection with long-term programs in space-vehicle, accelerator, and reactor shielding, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory has developed rather sophisticated calculational methods for determining the transport in matter of protons, neutrons, pions, muons, electrons, and photons. This work has resulted in several Monte Carlo radiation-transport computer codes which are quite general with respect to allowable source-particle descriptions, geometries, material compositions, etc. Recently, a limited study has been directed toward applying some of these computer codes to predict quantities of interest in the fields of radiotherapy and radio biology, such as depth-dose patterns, and toward assessing the accuracy of the codes for applications in these fields. In this paper, the calculational methods are described and comparisons of calculated and experi mental results are presented for dose distributions produced by protons, neutrons, and negatively charged pions. Comparisons of calculated and experimental cell-survival probabilities are also plesented.