Internal ion sources are widely adopted in commercial cyclotrons used for short-life isotopes produc-tion. Without beam manipulation provided by the external beam injection line, the central region of this type of cyclotron is more sensitive and should be carefully designed. A design study and beam dynamics simulation for the central region of a 10 MeV compact cyclotron is presented. The OPERA3D/TOSCA code was used to calculate the electric field from a parameterized three dimensional (3D) central region model. With iterative structure optimizations of the central region, the beam centering and vertical focusing is well controlled, and the RF phase acceptance is around 25° A c++ code for beam simulation in the central region was developed and tested.