Condensed-history Monte-Carlo simulation for charged particles: what can it do for us?

Abstract

Condensed-history (CH) Monte-Carlo (MC) groups together the vast number of individual charged-particle collisions using multiple scattering theory for elastic angular changes and stopping power for energy losses. CH codes such as EGS4 have been enormously successful in simulating the transport of electrons, for example, in radiotherapy. MC-derived values of the water-to-air stopping-power ratio, s(w/air), are used in all modern codes of practice for absolute dose determination in radiotherapy clinics. MC can also directly yield the dose ratio Dmed/Ddet for a dosimeter in a medium, and Correlated Sampling has been exploited to increase the efficiency, e. g., the central electrode in an ion chamber (aluminium vs. graphite). The extremely low density of the gas in an ion chamber poses problems for CH codes. However, multiple scattering can now be combined with single scattering and is expected to finally resolve important chamber perturbation effects. An exciting application of CH MC in radiotherapy is the computation of dose distributions in patients. Currently one can achieve an uncertainty around 1% (1 SD) in mm-sized voxels in several minutes for an electron beam and in around an hour for a photon treatment plan on hardware costing less than $20,000, and thus avoid all the various approximations conventionally used to account for inhomogeneities. In the microdosimetry/track structure field, CH codes have shown that the fluence (dPhi/dE) per unit dose at low electron energies is virtually independent of incident particle energy or depth, which simply explains the negligible RBE variation.