Hadrontherapy: a Geant4-Based Tool for Proton/Ion-Therapy Studies

Abstract

Hadrontherapy is a C++, free and open source application developed using the Geant4 Monte Carlo libraries The basic version of Hadrontherapy is contained in the official Geant4 distribution (wwwcernch/Geant4/download), inside the category of the advanced examples This version permits the simulation of a typical proton/ion transport beam line and the calculation of dose and fluence distributions inside a test phantom A more complete version of the program is separately maintained and released by the authors and it offers a wider set of tools useful for Users interested in proton/ion-therapy studies It gives the possibility to retrieve ion stopping powers in arbitrary geometrical configuration, to calculate 3D distributions of fluences, dose deposited and LET of primary and of the generated secondary beams, to simulate typical nuclear physics experiments, to interactively switch between different implemented geometries, etc In this work the main characteristics of the actual full version of Hadrontherapy will be reported and results discussed and compared with the available experimental data For more information the reader can refer to the Hadrontherapy website (author)