Carbon therapy of a human brain

We watch how, a single carbon ion impinging the brain produced progenies (also termed secondaries or even contaminants when they are unwanted but inevitable) such as pions, muons, neutrinos, neutrons, protons and electrons in the brain. This history is atypical; most carbon ions in the beam would not produce pions. It has been cherry-picked from simulation of a 200 MeV/nucleon carbon beam entering the side of the head (a lateral beam in clinical terms). A beam consists of many source particles — carbon ions in this case. The simulation mimics one of the treatment options for brain tumour. The human brain was represented by a VIP-Man anthropomorphic voxel phantom, where tissue segmentation traces back to the Visible Human Project. Due to the stochastic nature of radiation interactions, every carbon ion sent in would track a different trajectory, undergo different types of collision and produce different types of particle. This is an instance out of countless possibilities.

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