Fast Monte Carlo Electron-Photon Transport Method and Application in Accurate Radiotherapy

Abstract

Monte Carlo (MC) method is the most accurate computational method for dose calculation, but its wide application on clinical accurate radiotherapy is hindered due to its poor speed of converging and long computation time. In the MC dose calculation research, the main task is to speed up computation while high precision is maintained. The purpose of this paper is to enhance the calculation speed of MC method for electron-photon transport with high precision and ultimately to reduce the accurate radiotherapy dose calculation time based on normal computer to the level of several hours, which meets the requirement of clinical dose verification. Based on the existing Super Monte Carlo Simulation Program (SuperMC), developed by FDS Team, a fast MC method for electron-photon coupled transport was presented with focus on two aspects: firstly, through simplifying and optimizing the physical model of the electron-photon transport, the calculation speed was increased with slightly reduction of calculation accuracy; secondly, using a variety of MC calculation acceleration methods, for example, taking use of obtained information in previous calculations to avoid repeat simulation of particles with identical history; applying proper variance reduction techniques to accelerate MC method convergence rate, etc. The fast MC method was tested by a lot of simple physical models and clinical cases included nasopharyngeal carcinoma, peripheral lung tumor, cervical carcinoma, etc. The result shows that the fast MC method for electron-photon transport was fast enough to meet the requirement of clinical accurate radiotherapy dose verification. Later, the method will be applied to the Accurate/Advanced Radiation Therapy System ARTS as a MC dose verification module.