I was wondering if anyone was aware of any available data or published literature comparing the QGSP_BIC_HP and QGSP_BIC_ALLHP hadronic physics models? It seems as though the “BIC_ALLHP” model was developed specifically to cover the energies commonly seen in proton therapy, however I haven’t been able to find any published data on how the ALLHP model performs relative to the regular flavor of the model.
If none exists I’ll be happy to perform some comparisons myself – however I wanted to make sure I’m not wasting my time repeating work already done.
I think there is a small piece of documentation here. From the documentation, I understand that the inelastic cross sections are taken from TENDL. It seems Geant4 uses the 2019 release.
Maybe @ribon or @civanch know about a dedicated publication about a comparison of regular physics vs allHP within Geant4 .
I have not published anything, neither I have done a systematic study. But my experience with _AllHP for protons is that the dose profiles (IDD) are closer to experiment with _HP, but if you are interested on the isotope production you definitely need _ALLHP
Thank you both for your helpful replies. Do either of you happen to know who was responsible for implementing the _ALLHP model in Geant4? I do get the impression it was implemented for cyclotron based production of radioisotopes as @arce mentioned.
I will share an update to the Geant forum once I have calculated dose and LET distributions (using HP and ALLHP) for clinical beams used at our proton center.
I was responsible for it. AllHP uses the TENDL data base, because it is the only one that contains data for all isotopes. You may try the ENDF-VII0_proton database, which only uses experimental data (TENDL is supposed to use that data, plus theorical extrapolations)
Just following up on this. I simulated an 80 MeV monoenergetic proton beam using a model of our spot scanning beamline at MD Anderson. QGSP_BIC_HP and QGSP_BIC_ALLHP show almost no difference in terms of dose distribution. It’s very difficult to see from the figure but in the entrance region RegularHP is systematically higher than AllHP, but only by about 1%.
