The potential application of beta-delayed particle decay beam 9C in cancer therapy

A radioactive ion beam like 9C serves as a double radiation source and may be useful in cancer treatment, where the essential irradiation comes from the external beam itself and the extra one is due to the low-energy particles emitted internally during the decay of 9C. Based on the microdosimetric specific energy spectrum in cell nuclei, a model to evaluate the biological effect induced by the internally emitted particles from a beta-delayed particle decay beam has been developed. In this paper, using this model the additional contributions to the cell-killing effect due to the emitted particles from stopping 9C ions were incorporated in the design of spread-out Bragg peaks (SOBP) for radioactive 9C beams. For this purpose, a simulated annealing algorithm was employed to optimize the superposing weighting fractions of all monoenergetic beams so that a uniform cell survival level could be realized across the SOBP within an acceptable deviation of 5%. SOBPs with different widths and at different cell survival levels were designed for both therapeutic 9C and 12C beams for comparison. The potential use of the 9C beam in radiotherapy compared to the 12C beam, which is commonly adopted in the practices of current heavy-ion therapy, is shown systematically in terms of the distributions of biological effective dose and cell survival along the beam penetration.