Pre-treatment radiotherapy dose verification using Monte Carlo doselet modulation in a spherical phantom

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Due to the increasing complexity of radiotherapy delivery, accurate dose verification has become an essential part of the clinical treatment process. The purpose of this work was to develop a pre-treatment verification technique capable of quickly reconstructing 3D dose distributions from both coplanar and non-coplanar treatments. For each treatment field, electronic portal images were taken in non-transmission mode (with no patient in the beam) allowing the derivation of the delivered fluence maps. The dose reconstruction was then performed in a spherical water phantom by modulating and summing the Monte Carlo (MC) doselets, defined on a spherical co-ordinate system, and pre-calculated from azimuthally symmetric fluence above the jaws. The technique, called the spherical doselet modulation (SDM) method, essentially eliminates the statistical uncertainty of the MC dose calculations by exploiting the azimuthal symmetry in both a patient-independent phase-space and in a virtual spherical water phantom. For example, this symmetry allowed the number of doselets necessary for dose reconstruction to be reduced by a factor of ∼250. In this work, only 51 radially binned doselets were used (each generated from all particles in a given annulus of the phase-space, azimuthally redistributed into a small cylindrical sector). The SDM method mitigates the most computationally intensive part of this type of dose reconstruction-–reading, weighting and summing dose matrices. The accuracy of the system was tested against MC calculations as well as our previously reported phase-space modulation method, using a series of open field and IMRT cases. The mean chi- and gamma-test 3%/3 mm success rates of the SDM method were 98.6% and 99.5%, respectively, when compared to full MC simulation. The total calculation time was 96 s per treatment field on a single processor core.