Upper bound dose values for meson radiation in heavy-ion therapy

Radiation treatment of cancer has evolved to include massive particle beams, instead of traditional
irradiation procedures. Thus, patient doses and worker radiological protection have become issues of
constant concern in the use of these new technologies, especially for proton- and heavy-ion-therapy.
In the beam energies of interest of heavy-ion-therapy, secondary particle radiation comes from
proton, neutron, and neutral and charged pions produced in the nuclear collisions of the beam with
human tissue atoms. This work, for the first time, offers the upper bound of meson radiation dose in
organic tissues due to secondary meson radiation in heavy-ion therapy. A model based on intranuclear
collision has been used to follow in time the nuclear reaction and to determine the secondary
radiation due to the meson yield produced in the beam interaction with nuclei in the
tissue-equivalent media and water. The multiplicity, energy spectrum, and angular distribution of
these pions, as we...

Source: Journal of Radiological Protection - March 27, 2018 Category: Physics Authors: C Rabin, M Gon çalves, S B Duarte and G A González-Sprinberg Source Type: research