Development of computational model for cell dose and DNA damage quantification of multicellular system.

The aim of this study is to build a computational model to investigate the cell dose and cell DNA damage distribution of a multicellular tissue system under the irradiation. In this work, we developed a computational model for quantifying cell dose and double strand break (DSB) number in a multicellular system by simulating the radiation transport in 2D and 3D cell culture. The model was based on an open-source radiation transport package, Geant4 with Geant4-DNA physics. First, the computational multicellular system was created using a developed program, CelllMaker. Second, the radiation transport simulation for cells was conducted using Geant4 package with the Geant4-DNA physics to obtain the cellular dose and cellular DSB yield. Using the method described in this work, it is possible to obtain the cellular dose and DNA damage simultaneously. The developed model provides a solution for quantifying the cellular dose and cellular DNA damage which are not easily determined in a radiobiological experiment. With limited validation data for the model, this preliminary study provides a roadmap for building a comprehensive toolkit for simulating cellular dose and DNA damage of multicellular tissue systems.