Abstract
Monte Carlo (MC) codes are increasingly spreading in the hadrontherapy community due to their detailed description of radiation transport and interaction with matter. The suitability of a MC code for application to hadrontherapy demands accurate and reliable physical models capable of handling all components of the expected radiation field. This becomes extremely important for correctly performing not only physical but also biologically based dose calculations, especially in cases where ions heavier than protons are involved. In addition, accurate prediction of emerging secondary radiation is of utmost importance in innovative areas of research aiming at in vivo treatment verification. This contribution will address the recent developments of the FLUKA MC code and its practical applications in this field. Refinements of the FLUKA nuclear models in the therapeutic energy interval lead to an improved description of the mixed radiation field as shown in the presented benchmarks against experimental data with both 4He and 12C ion beams. Accurate description of ionization energy losses and of particle scattering and interactions lead to the excellent agreement of calculated depth–dose profiles with those measured at leading European hadron therapy centers, both with proton and ion beams. In order to support the application of FLUKA in hospital-based environments, Flair, the FLUKA graphical interface, has been enhanced with the capability of translating CT DICOM images into voxel-based computational phantoms in a fast and well-structured way. The interface is capable of importing also radiotherapy treatment data described in DICOM RT standard. In addition, the interface is equipped with an intuitive PET scanner geometry generator and automatic recording of coincidence events. Clinically, similar cases will be presented both in terms of absorbed dose and biological dose calculations describing the various available features.
Highlights
Popularity of Monte Carlo (MC) techniques in the field of medical physics is increasing rapidly in recent years
FLUKA has been intensively benchmarked against depth–dose data and lateral-dose profiles from various accelerators used for research and clinical ion-beam therapy (IBT), which have been typically acquired with different water columns with parallelplate ionization chambers [depth–dose [61, 62]] and small volume ionization chambers in water [lateral-dose profiles [63]]
The result is remarkable, considering that the “wall difference” configuration is more sensitive to measurement artifacts not accounted for by the simulation, such as activation produced by previous beam pulses, pile-up of low energy particles, and scatter-radiation from the nozzle, which is partly screened by the collimator
Summary
Popularity of Monte Carlo (MC) techniques in the field of medical physics is increasing rapidly in recent years. MC simulations are an essential tool for the design and commissioning of novel clinical facilities, allowing a detailed description of the beam line and the delivery system They are widely used for bunker design, shielding, FLUKA Code for Particle Therapy and radiation protection. The FLUKA code [8, 9] is a general purpose Monte Carlo code simulating the interaction and transport of hadrons, heavy ions, and electromagnetic particles. It is jointly developed by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN).
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