Radiotherapy aims to sterilize cancer cells through ionization induced damages to their DNA whilst trying to reduce dose burdens to healthy tissues. This can be achieved to a certain extent by optimizing the choice of radiation to treat the patient, i.e. the types of particles and their energy based on their specific interaction patterns. In particular, the formation of complex clusters of energy deposits (EDs) increases with the linear energy transferred for a given particle. These differences cause variation in the relative biological effectiveness (RBE). The complexity of ED clusters might be related to complex forms of DNA damage, which are more difficult to repair and therefore prone to inactivate the cells. Hence, mapping of the number and complexity of ED clusters for different radiation qualities could aid to infer a surrogate measure substituting physical dose and LET as main predictors for the RBE . In this work the spatial patterns of EDs at the nanometre scale were characterized for various energies of proton, helium, lithium and carbon ions. A track structure Monte Carlo code, LIonTrack, was developed to accurately simulate the light ion tracks in liquid water. The methods to emulate EDs at clinical dose levels in cell nucleus-sized targets for both 60Co photons and light ions were established, and applied to liquid water targets. All EDs enclosed in such targets were analyzed with a specifically developed cluster algorithm where clustering was defined by a single parameter, the maximum distance between nearest neighbour EDs. When comparing measured RBE for different radiation qualities, there are cases for which RBE do not increase with LET but instead increase with the frequencies of high order ED clusters. A test surrogate-measure based on ED cluster frequencies correlated to parameters of experimentally determined cell survival. The tools developed in this thesis can facilitate future exploration of semi-mechanistic modelling of the RBE.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:uu-206385 |
| Date | January 2013 |
| Creators | Bäckström, Gloria |
| Publisher | Uppsala universitet, Avdelningen för sjukhusfysik, Uppsala |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral thesis, comprehensive summary, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Digital Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Medicine, 1651-6206 ; 930 |
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