ABSTRACT
Relative Biological Effectiveness (RBE) represents the ratio between a radiation of reference and a specific type of radiation, with its proper physical characteristics and linear energy transfer. RBE is often used in radiobiology to test the capability of a particular radiation in inducing a biological effect in comparison to the reference one. The use of hadrons has proved to be more efficient in releasing the dose within the targets thanks to their physical properties and, while proton therapy is associated with an RBE. Usually, radiobiological simulations are performed in two main steps. In the first step, Monte Carlo simulations are used to generate the phase space of primary and secondary particles interacting with a cell population. In a second step the particle phase space is used as an input of a radiobiological model to evaluate a biological effect for a specific biological endpoint, such as the RBE of the cell survival.
