G4Linac_MT, an easy-to-use Geant4-based code for modeling medical linear accelerator

Abstract

In this paper, we present G4Linac_MT, a simple-to-use open source code developed to facilitate the use of the Geant4 C++ toolkit for the simulation of a medical linear accelerator (linac). This multithreaded code encapsulates several well-developed C++ modules serving to handle the complexity of coding geometry and material, to easy plot histograms of various physics quantities, to auto-merge output data created by all working threads into a single file, to well-estimate the number of simulated primary particles required to achieve data with a statistical uncertainty < 1% and also the CPU time required for, to use a set of variance reduction techniques as bremsstrahlung splitting, particle recycling, particle rotational splitting and stacking mechanism, to use a new format of phase space file based on HDF5-C++ scientific library which has been developed specially for this code. In order to minimize human effort required by Geant4 coding and validating of a linac, the code comes with a Java-based GUI application which contains separated GUI modules for linac head simulation, dose calculation, data analysis, geometry modeling and gamma index calculation. Results from Monte Carlo simulations of linac head of a Saturne 43 12 MV configuring a 10 × 10 cm2 radiation field are showed in order to demonstrate the G4Linac_MT capabilities. Thus, comparisons between simulated dosimetric functions and measured ones in a water phantom have been established by using a gamma index method and the results show a good agreement within 2.6%-1 mm accuracy. In addition, after optimizing variance reduction techniques, the overall CPU time spent by this multithreaded code has been decreased by a factor of 7.