Purpose: Different alpha exposure setups are often used to study the relation between biological responses and LET. This study aimed to estimate the dose heterogeneity and uncertainty in four exposure setups using Geant4 and PARTRAC codes. The importance of the irradiation system characteristics was shown in the context of reporting experimental results, especially in radiobiological studies at the molecular level.
Materials and methods: Geant4 was used to estimate the dose distributions in cells grown on a disk exposed to alpha particles penetrating from above and below. The latter setup was simulated without and with a collimator. PARTRAC was used for the validation of Geant4 simulations based on distributions of the number of alpha particles penetrating a round nucleus and the deposited energy.
Results: The LET distributions obtained for simulated setups excluding the collimator were wide and non-Gaussian. Using a collimator resulted in a Gaussian LET distribution, but strongly reduced dose rate and dose homogeneity. Comparison between PARTRAC and Geant4 calculations for the cell nucleus exposed to alpha radiation showed an excellent agreement.
Conclusions: The interpretation of results from radiobiological experiments with alpha particles should always cover the characteristics of the experimental setup, which can be done precisely with computational methods.
Keywords: Alpha radiation; Monte Carlo modeling; PARTRAC vs. Geant4; dose homogeneity; high LET.