Geant4 Simulations of Hadron Therapy and Refinement of User Interface

Abstract: Radiotherapy is one of the most used methods for treating cancer and the most common way to execute such treatments is to irradiate tumors with high energy photons. This can damage healthy tissue along the irradiation line. By using hadron therapy and instead irradiate the tumor with charged particles (protons or Carbon 12 ions), the energy can be concentrated to a more specific place in the body. However, the method is not well studied and the tools available for simulating hadron therapy can be hard to use. When simulating hadron therapy and other nuclear interactions a large amount of calculations need to be executed. Monte Carlo methods is a numerical method to solve equations based on repeated number sampling and is used in the simulation program Geant4. Hadron therapy was simulated with Geant4 and the data was analyzed with the data analysis framework ROOT. New macros and analysis scripts were created with the intention to help new Geant4 users. The aim to make Geant4 easier to use was partially met. The implementation of code for the low energy region of Carbon 12 projectiles was unsuccessful.