Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 389095, 5 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/389095
Research Article

A Simulation Study of the Radiation-Induced Bystander Effect: Modeling with Stochastically Defined Signal Reemission

Kohei Sasaki,1 Kosuke Wakui,2 Kaori Tsutsumi,3 Akio Itoh,1 and Hiroyuki Date3

1Graduate School of Engineering, Kyoto University, Kyoto 606-8501, Japan
2Graduate School of Health Sciences, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 060-0812, Japan
3Faculty of Health Sciences, Hokkaido University, Sapporo 060-0812, Japan

Received 17 March 2012; Revised 2 May 2012; Accepted 21 May 2012

Academic Editor: Loredana Marcu

Copyright © 2012 Kohei Sasaki et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The radiation-induced bystander effect (RIBE) has been experimentally observed for different types of radiation, cell types, and cell culture conditions. However, the behavior of signal transmission between unirradiated and irradiated cells is not well known. In this study, we have developed a new model for RIBE based on the diffusion of soluble factors in cell cultures using a Monte Carlo technique. The model involves the signal emission probability from bystander cells following Poisson statistics. Simulations with this model show that the spatial configuration of the bystander cells agrees well with that of corresponding experiments, where the optimal emission probability is estimated through a large number of simulation runs. It was suggested that the most likely probability falls within 0.63–0.92 for mean number of the emission signals ranging from 1.0 to 2.5.