Calculations of specific cellular doses for low-energy electrons

The objectives of this work were to calculate the cellular doses and the lineal energies of low-energy electrons in liquid water for different source-target geometry in a cell. Calculated specific cellular doses and their variations were analyzed for the dependences on electron energy, source-target geometry, elastic interaction, and type of energy depositions, i.e. starter, stopper, insider and crosser. Two approaches, i.e. the probabilistic method and the mixed method, were applied. In the probabilistic method, the Monte Carlo Penelope code was used. In the mixed method, the range-energy relation and the sampling of electron paths were applied. It was found that for N ← Cy elastic interactions led to a change of the specific cellular dose by about 30% for electron energies below 10 keV. Here N ← Cy denotes electrons emitted from the source region, Cy (cytoplasm), to deposit energy in the target region, N (cell nucleus). The variation of specific cellular dose was found greater (more than 10%) for N ← Cy than N ← N, C ← C and C ← CS, where C and CS denote the cell and cell surface, respectively. The lineal energy distribution varied substantially with electron energy, source-target geometry, and target size. The maximum values of the relative dose-mean lineal energy for 1, 5 and 10 keV electrons, relative to 36 keV reference electrons used to define the relative biological effectiveness, occurred at target radii of several tens, hundreds and thousands nanometers, respectively.