Review of Geant4 Applications in Radiobiology

Document Type : Review Article

Authors

1 ِDepartment of Medical Physics,Faculty of Medicine, Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, Mashhad, Iran

2 Department of Physics, Faculty of Rajaee, Quchan Branch, Technical and Vocational University (TVU), Khorasan Razavi, Iran

3 Medical Physics Research Center, Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, Mashhad, Iran

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Main Subjects

References

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Iranian Journal of Medical Physics
Volume 16, Issue 4 - Serial Number 4
July and August 2019
Pages 255-263

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History

  • Receive Date: 21 May 2018
  • Revise Date: 25 July 2018
  • Accept Date: 04 August 2018

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