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

Yoonsun Chung; Sang Hee Ahn; Changhoon Choi; Sohee Park

doi:10.14316/pmp.2017.28.1.11

Journal List > Prog Med Phys > v.28(1) > 1098567

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Chung, Ahn, Choi, and Park: Development of Program for Relative Biological Effectiveness (RBE) Analysis of Particle Beam Therapy

Original Article

Progress in Medical Physics 2017;28(1):11-15.

Published online: 17 March 2017

DOI: https://doi.org/10.14316/pmp.2017.28.1.11

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

Yoonsun Chung^∗,, Sang Hee Ahn^†, Changhoon Choi^∗, Sohee Park^∗

^∗Department of Radiation Oncology, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea

^†Department of Health Sciences and Technology, Samsung Advanced Institute for Health Sciences and Technology, Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, Korea

Corresponding author Yoonsun Chung (yoonsun.chung@samsung.com) Tel: 82-2-6007-5446 Fax: 82-2-6190-5332

Received 17 March 201724 March 2017 Accepted 24 March 2017

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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.

Keywords: Relative biological effectiveness, Particle beam therapy, Software tool

REFERENCES

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Fig. 1.

The process of RBE analysis.

Fig. 2.

The example of cell survival curve using RBE analysis program.

Fig. 3.

The example of analysis results obtained with RBE analysis program.

Table 1.

Fitting coefficients (α and β) for the linear-quadratic model and goodness-of-fit (R²) from RBE analysis program (N) and commercial graphing software (E) for example cases.

Cases	SF = exp (−αD −βD²)				Goodness-of-fit
Cases	α (95% confidence intervals)		β (95% confidence intervals)		R²
	N	E	N	E	N	E
Case 1 (X-ray)	0.124	0.124	0.061	0.061	1.000	1.000
	(0.100~0.147)	(0.114~0.134)	(0.053~0.068)	(0.057~0.064)
Case 1 (Proton)	0.125	0.125	0.081	0.081	1.000	1.000
	(0.111~0.140)	(0.111~0.140)	(0.075~0.086)	(0.075~0.086)
Case 2 (X-ray)	0.470	0.470	0.057	0.057	0.9999	0.9948
	(0.355~0.584)	(0.272~0.667)	(0.010~0.105)	(−0.025~0.140)
Case 2 (Proton)	0.905	0.905	−0.008	−0.008	0.9999	0.9986
	(0.862~0.949)	(0.712~1.097)	(−0.026~0.010)	(−0.089~0.073)
Case 3 (X-ray)	0.066	0.066	0.029	0.029	0.9987	0.9439
	(−0.149~0.280)	(−0.032~0.163)	(−0.023~0.080)	(0.005~0.052)
Case 3 (Proton)	0.122	0.122	0.037	0.037	0.9989	0.9496
	(0.017~0.227)	(−0.0163~0.260)	(0.008~0.065)	(0~0.074)

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