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Development of a Coupled Simulation Toolkit for Computational Radiation Biology Based On Geant4 and CompuCell3D

R Liu1*, K Higley2 , M Swat3 , (1) Washington University, St. Louis, MO, (2) Oregon State University, Corvallis, Oregon, (3) Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

Presentations

(Thursday, 8/2/2018) 1:00 PM - 3:00 PM

Room: Karl Dean Ballroom A1

Purpose: This work was intended to deliver a novel tool that can significantly improve our understanding of how tissue biology is affected by the presence of ionizing radiation.

Methods: Our computational platform is based on two key software components: CompuCell3D and Geant4. Merging the two tools into one modeling platform gives us ability to simulate how dynamics of a biological tissue in the presence of ionizing radiation. At each step of the simulation, we assess the current effect of the radiation on simulated cells and adjust accordingly the properties of affected cells and their environment. Those adjustments have an effect on the temporal evolution of the cellular patterns. Thus, by having a way to simulate in detail how radiation affects individual cells, we can build more realistic, and hence more predictive models of radiotherapy.

Results: We focused on introducing this novel framework with relevant technical details, illustrated with a case study. A vascular tumor simulation model based on the developed toolkit was studied in this work. Despite the rescaling of the tumor size, the model produces a range of biologically reasonable morphologies that allow study of how microbeam radiation therapy (MRT) treatment affects the growth rate, size, and morphology of vascular tumors, which will help to design the effective MRT treatment plan in the real clinical trials in the future.

Conclusion: To the best of our knowledge, this multi-platform simulation is the first piece of research to combine Geant4 and CC3D to implement the coupled cell biology and radiation transport simulation for quantifying cell response after irradiation. The test simulation shows that the developed model could be potentially used to facilitate the investigation of radiation biology study. With interacting with clinicians and experimentalists we may gather experimental data to parameterize, calibrate and validate the model for its clinical applications.

Keywords

Not Applicable / None Entered.

Taxonomy

TH- Radiobiology(RBio)/Biology(Bio): RBio- Particle therapy- other

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