Improvements in the stopping power library libdEdx and release of the web GUI dedx.au.dk

Purpose: In ion beam therapy electronic stopping power data enter in different disciplines, e.g., dose planning, dosimetry, and radiobiology. However, relevant stopping power data are only known within an accuracy of 2%-10%. We started the software library project libdEdx to unify data from several well-known stopping power sources into one ready-to-use package being 1) freely available and 2) easy accessible via a web-based front end. Methods: Currently, stopping power data from PSTAR, ASTAR, MSTAR and ICRU49+73 are implemented along with a version of the Bethe formula. The library is programmed in the language C to provide broad portability and high performance. A clean API provides full access to the underlying functions and thread safety in multi-threaded applications. The possibility to define arbitrary materials complements the list of predefined ICRU materials. Furthermore, we introduced a collection of tools, e.g., inverse stopping power look-up as well as CSDA range calculation and its inverse. Results: On a standard desktop PC libdEdx calculates 22 million look-ups/sec. A web GUI (available at http://dedx.au.dk) provides easy access to libdEdx and download of stopping data and graphs. For compounds, we observe that stopping power data are robust for variations in the mean excitation potential of the constituents as long as the total mean excitation potential is fixated. Conclusion: We released libdEdx (version number 1.2.1: http://sf.net/projects/libdedx/) with a web-based GUI. Future development will focus on implementing further stopping powers sources (e.g., for electrons and nuclear stopping) and relativistic effects.