ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how state-of-the-art Monte Carlo techniques can be used to investigate Nanoparticle radio-enhancement to help to understand the fundamental mechanism behind it and the biological result, to guide upcoming studies. It introduces the distinctive technical features which are useful for simulating high–Z NP-enhanced radiation interactions and afterwards give a brief overview about the existing approaches and results and discuss other emerging research directions. Many track structure (TS) physics models have been developed in the past decades for radiation biophysics applications. TS codes capable to model the electromagnetic interactions in the biological medium (approximated as liquid water), which can be used for NP radio-enhancement studies in hadron therapy. The local effect model, which is for example used clinically for carbon ion treatment planning at the Heidelberg Ion-Beam Therapy Center, relies on the determination of the biological effect of incident ions starting from the response of cells or tissues to photons.
