Anton LECHNER

CERN, Geneva  - Switzerland

My current work as a PhD-student at CERN consists of investigations concerning the usage of modern software tools for determining the spatial dose distribution in patients subject to radiotherapy with ion beams. In this context I employ Monte Carlo Methods and distributed computing techniques (particularly Grid) to achieve a high precision and fast computations suitable to clinical applications. My work involves the quantitative assessment of relevant physics models for low-energetic ions (as occuring in radiothereupical applications), currently available in the Geant4 Simulation Toolkit. Both electromagnetic and hadronic interactions are taken into account. Possible extensions of the existing Geant4 physics are considered to design and implement new or improved models. An important part of my thesis is to evaluate the possibility to exploit a distributed computing environment for achieving a precise dose calculation within a time frame compatible with clinical applications at a hadrontherapy facility. For this purpose I perform large-scale Geant4-based dose calculations on the LCG.