A GATE/Geant4 Monte Carlo toolkit for surface dose calculation in VMAT breast cancer radiotherapy

Abstract

The accuracy of superficial dose calculations for breast cancer treatments with Volumetric Modulated Arc Therapy (VMAT) is of major importance. For target volumes close to the surface, the inverse dosimetric planning can lead to very high fluences in the build-up region to properly cover the volume to be treated. Various radiotherapy modalities are currently used in parallel with additional protocols to enable a better control on the dose delivery (bolus, target volume margins). One of the difficulties currently facing medical physicists is the lack of available tools to test the impact of these different solutions on the superficial dose distribution. We present a new open source toolkit to assist medical physicists in evaluating the 3D distributions of superficial dose in VMAT breast cancer treatments. This tool is based on the GATE Monte Carlo software, a Geant4 application dedicated to medical physics. A set of macros has been developed to simulate in an easy way a full VMAT plan from the information available in the DICOM-RT files (image, plan, structure and dose). The toolkit has been tested on a 6 MV Varian NovalisTx™ accelerator. The paper presents a precise comparison of 3D surface dose distributions from experimental measurements (EBT3 films), TPS (Varian Eclipse) and Monte Carlo simulation (GATE). The comparison made it possible to highlight both the TPS biases for the surface dose calculation and the good performances of the developed toolkit. The simulation of surface dose distributions on a real patient has also been performed to illustrate the potential clinical applications.