Microdosimetric quantities

We shall start with definitions of the principal microdosimetric quantities. 

The basic concept of microdosimetry is the microdosimetric event (or, simply, event), which is energy deposition by a charged particle and its statistically correlated particles (e.g., secondary electrons from the same particle track) [15-17]. Events are important because they are statistically independent entities. The principal microdosimetric quantity, specific energy z, is defined as follows ... 

The dose-averaged specific energy z plays a fundamental role in microdosimetric-based models of radiation action. For instance, it will be shown below that its magnitude relative to D determines the extent to which dose-rate effects are important. If the micro-dosimetric spectrum /i(z) is known, z can be obtained by straightforward integration. There is, however, a second more powerful procedure for obtaining this quantity and this will be now explained. 

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