Development of a new microdosimetric biological weighting function for the RBE

An improved biological weighting function (IBWF) is proposed to phenomenologically relate microdosimetric lineal energy probability density distributions with the relative biological effectiveness (RBE) for the in vitro clonogenic cell survival (surviving fraction = 10%) of the most commonly used mammalian cell line, i.e. the Chinese hamster lung fibroblasts (V79). The IBWF, intended as a simple and robust tool for a fast RBE assessment to compare different exposure conditions in particle therapy beams, was determined through an iterative global-fitting process aimed to minimize the average relative deviation between RBE calculations and literature in vitro data in case of exposure to various types of ions from