A New GUI Based Patient-Specific Treatment Planning System for Boron Neutron Capture Therapy

Abstract

A new patient-specific treatment planning system, called BTPS, was developed for Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT). To facilitate planning BNCT, the BTPS was designed through overall planning procedures based on a user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI). A dose calculation engine based on MCNPX was embedded in the BTPS. An accelerated tally technique in MCNP and a parallel computing system to significantly reduce the computation time are also employed. To investigate the performance of the BTPS, computation times for calculating the absorbed dose in a voxel head phantom were evaluated according to the number of computers. To assess the results from the BTPS, thermal neutron fluxes and absorbed doses in a rectangular phantom were calculated and compared with those obtained by using the SERA. The differences in the thermal neutron fluxes and absorbed doses calculated by using BTPS and SERA were 4.3% and 3.8%, respectively, in root mean square. The BTPS facilitates planning of patient-specific BNCT treatments with easy manipulation, and the absorbed dose in the phantom can be calculated with the efficient computation time and good accuracy comparable to that of SERA. Therefore, it is noted that the BTPS is clinically superior to treatment planning systems of BNCT, and allows non-MCNP users to plan easily optimized BNCT treatment.