Marta Missiaggia

Francesco G. Cordoni, Marta Missiaggia, Emanuele Scifoni et al.

The present work develops ANAKIN: an Artificial iNtelligence bAsed model for (radiation induced) cell KIlliNg prediction. ANAKIN is trained and tested over 513 cell survival experiments with different types of radiation contained in the publicly available PIDE database. We show how ANAKIN accurately predicts several relevant biological endpoints over a wide broad range on ions beams and for a high number of cell--lines. We compare the prediction of ANAKIN to the only two radiobiological model for RBE prediction used in clinics, that is the Microdosimetric Kinetic Model (MKM) and the Local Effect Model (LEM version III), showing how ANAKIN has higher accuracy over the all considered biological endpoints. At last, via modern techniques of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), we show how ANAKIN predictions can be understood and explained, highlighting how ANAKIN is in fact able to reproduce relevant well-known biological patterns, such as the overkilling effect.

Giulio Bordieri, Giorgio Cartechini, Anna Bianchi et al.

The relationship between the physical characteristics of the radiation field and biological damage is central to both radiotherapy and radioprotection, yet the link between spatial scales of energy deposition and biological effects remains not entirely understood. To address this, we developed an interpretable deep learning model that predicts cell survival after proton and carbon ion irradiation, leveraging sequential attention to highlight relevant features and provide insight into the contribution of different energy deposition scales. Trained and tested on the PIDE dataset, our model incorporates, beside LET, nanodosimetric and microdosimetric quantities simulated with MC-Startrack and Open-TOPAS, enabling multi-scale characterization. While achieving high predictive accuracy, our approach also emphasizes transparency in decision-making. We demonstrate high accuracy in predicting RBE for in vitro experiments. Multiple scales are utilized concurrently, with no single spatial scale being predominant. Quantities defined at smaller spatial domains generally have a greater influence, whereas the LET plays a lesser role.