Benchmarking of PHITS for Carbon Ion Therapy

Up to now, carbon ions have shown the most favorable physical and radiobiological properties for radiation therapy of, for example, deep-seated radioresistant tumors. However, when carbon ions penetrate matter, they undergo inelastic nuclear reactions that give rise to secondary fragments contributing to the dose in the healthy tissue. This can cause damage to radiosensitive organs at risk when they are located in the vicinity of the tumor. Therefore, predictions of the yields and angular distributions of the secondary fragments are needed to be able to estimate the resulting biological effects in both the tumor region and the healthy tissues. This study presents the accuracy of simulations of therapeutic carbon ion beams with water, with the 3D MC (Monte Carlo) general purpose particle and ion transport code PHITS.

Simulations with PHITS of depth-dose distributions, beam attenuation, fragment yields, and fragment angular distributions from interactions of therapeutic carbon ion beams with water are compared to published measurements performed at Gesellschaft für Schwerionen Forschung (GSI).

The results presented in this study demonstrate that PHITS simulations of therapeutic carbon ion beams in water show overall a good agreement with measurements performed at GSI; for example, for light ions like H and He, simulations agree within about 10%. However, there is still a need to further improve the calculations of fragment yields, especially for underproduction of Li of up to 50%, by improving the nucleus-nucleus cross-section models.

The simulated data are clinically acceptable but there is still a need to further improve the models in the transport code PHITS. More reliable experimental data are therefore needed.