Acknowledgements This thesis could not have been written without help and support from the people I have worked with the last four years. I am very grateful and privileged for the opportunity this thesis has given me to work with all of you. The thesis would neither have been possible without funding. I am grateful for the financial support from the University of Bergen and the Trond Mohn Foundation. However, I would first and foremost like to thank my main supervisor, Kristian Smeland Ytre-Hauge, for all the help and encouragement throughout these years. Thank you for giving me this opportunity and for guiding me through these four years. Your support in all parts of this PhD project has been invaluable. I really appreciate all the time you spend on making your group in medical physics into such a good place to be. I want to give warm thanks to my co-supervisors Andrea Mairani and Camilla Stokkevåg. Thank you, Andrea, for inviting me to spend five weeks at CNAO in Pavia. Our discussions and your help with FLUKA have been very valuable. I really appreciate that you always have been available, also after my stay in Pavia. To Camilla: Thank you for your guidance during these years. I really appreciate your clinical insight and all the work you have put into helping me, especially by giving positive and constructive feedback on my work. My stay at CNAO gave me a more practical insight to the field of particle therapy, and I got to know many people who helped me with my work. Thanks to Giuseppe Magro, for welcoming me to CNAO and making sure that I had a good time both at and after work. Your help, both at CNAO and later, has really been appreciated. I would also like to thank Kyungdon Choi for help with programming during and after my stay at CNAO. I would like to acknowledge all my collaborators in Oslo. I am especially grateful to Eirik Malinen, who has been my main contact there and who has been involved in all my work with the Oslo group. I would also like to thank Nina Edin and Anne Marit Rykkelid for giving me insight into cell irradiation experiments and for help on the Oslo Cyclotron Laboratory beamline, and Espen Rusten for help with the hypoxia project, especially with analyzing PET images. Through the people in Oslo, I was also introduced to several PET experts in Turku, Finland, and I would like to thank you all for sharing your knowledge.