Prog Med Phys.  2017 Mar;28(1):11-15. 10.14316/pmp.2017.28.1.11.

Development of Program for Relative Biological Effectiveness (RBE) Analysis of Particle Beam Therapy

• Chung Y
• Ahn SH
• Choi C
• Park S

• KMID: 2382799
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.14316/pmp.2017.28.1.11

Abstract

Relative biological effectiveness (RBE) of particle beam needs to be evaluated at particle beam therapy centers before the clinical application of the particle beam. However, since RBE analysis is implemented manually, it is useful to have a tool that can easily and effectively handle the data of experiments to generate cell survival curve and to analyze RBE simultaneously. In this work, the development of a program for RBE analysis of particle beam therapy was presented. This RBE analysis program was developed to include two parts; fitting the cell survival curves to linear-quadratic model and calculating the RBE values at a certain endpoint using fitting results. This program was also developed to simultaneously compare and analyze the template results that stored experiment data with photon and particle beam irradiations. The results of the cell survival curve obtained by each irradiation can be analyzed by the user on a desired data after reading the template stored in the easy-to-use excel file. The analysis results include the cell survival curves with error range, which are appeared in the screen and the α and β parameters of linear-quadratic model with 95% confidence intervals, RBE values, and R² values to evaluate goodness-of-fit of survival curves to model, which are stored in a text cvs file. This software can generate cell survival curve, fit to model, and calculate RBE all at once with raw experiment data, so it helps users to save time for data handling and to reduce the possibility of making error on analysis. As a coming plan, we will create a user-friendly graphical user interface to present the results more intuitively.

Keyword

Relative biological effectiveness; Particle beam therapy; Software tool

MeSH Terms

Cell Survival
Relative Biological Effectiveness*

Figure

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  Fig. 1. The process of RBE analysis.

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  Fig. 2. The example of cell survival curve using RBE analysis program.

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  Fig. 3. The example of analysis results obtained with RBE analysis program.

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