Reply to comment on ‘Modeling for predicting survival fraction of cells after ultra-high dose rate irradiation’

Abstract

Liew and Mairani commented on our paper ‘Modeling for predicting survival fraction of cells after ultra-high dose rate irradiation’ (Shiraishi et al 2024a Phys. Med. Biol.69 015017), which proposed a biophysical model to predict the dose–response curve of surviving cell fractions after ultra-high dose rate irradiation following conventional dose rate irradiation by considering DNA damage yields. They suggested the need to consider oxygen concentration in our prediction model and possible issues related to the data selection process used for the benchmarking test in our paper. In this reply, we discuss the limitations of both the present model and the available experimental data for determining the model’s parameters. We also demonstrate that our proposed model can reproduce the experimental survival data even when using only the experimental DNA damage data measured reliably under normoxic conditions.