Abstract
Purpose:Adding kernels (small perturbations in leaf positions) to the existing apertures of VMAT control points may improve plan quality. We investigate the calculation of kernel doses using a parallelized Monte Carlo (MC) method.Methods:A clinical prostate VMAT DICOM plan was exported from Eclipse. An arbitrary control point and leaf were chosen, and a modified MLC file was created, corresponding to the leaf position offset by 0.5cm. The additional dose produced by this 0.5 cm × 0.5 cm kernel was calculated using the DOSXYZnrc component module of BEAMnrc. A range of particle history counts were run (varying from 3 × 106 to 3 × 107); each job was split among 1, 10, or 100 parallel processes. A particle count of 3 × 106 was established as the lower range because it provided the minimal accuracy level.Results:As expected, an increase in particle counts linearly increases run time. For the lowest particle count, the time varied from 30 hours for the single‐processor run, to 0.30 hours for the 100‐processor run.Conclusion:Parallel processing of MC calculations in the EGS framework significantly decreases time necessary for each kernel dose calculation. Particle counts lower than 1 × 106 have too large of an error to output accurate dose for a Monte Carlo kernel calculation. Future work will investigate increasing the number of parallel processes and optimizing run times for multiple kernel calculations.
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