Hadrontherapy: An open source, Geant4-based application for proton-ion therapy studies

Hadrontherapy is an open source application based on the Geant4 Monte Carlo libraries. It can be downloaded with the Geant4 official code and can be found in the category of the advanced examples ($G4Install/examples/advanced folder of the Geant4 distribution). Since its original version, released in 2004, Hadrontherapy permitted the simulation of a typical proton therapy beam line, together with all it elements (collimators, scattering systems, etc.) and the calculation of the corresponding dose distribution curves in water and other materials. In this paper we will report on the newest development and improvement of Hadrontherapy as it will be released in the Geant4 9.3 version. The new version of application will furnish a set of tools useful for Users interested in studies related to proton/ion therapy. The new version of Hadrontherapy will permit, in fact, the transport of carbon beams, using the state-of-art of the Geant4 electromagnetic and hadronic models, the calculation of some basic parameters like stopping powers, or the possibility to easily change the geometrical configuration for the simulation of typical nuclear physics experiment of interest in the hadrontherapy field. Other capabilities are inserted in the new Hadrontherapy version even if not all are reported in this paper. For more information the reader can refer to the on-line manual of Hadrontherapy that can be found inside the Geant4 official website (www.cern.ch/geant4).