Adjoint Monte Carlo methods for radiotherapy treatment planning
Journal Article
·
· Transactions of the American Nuclear Society
OSTI ID:436782
- Oak Ridge National Laboratory, TN (United States)
For the past two decades, clinical procedures using highly collimated radiation beams, especially photons, have been used routinely. The main idea in radiation cancer therapy has been to maximize the dose in each point of the tumor without affecting the surrounding healthy tissue and especially the vital organs like the spine and the liver, using individually nonlethal beams that intersect at the tumor. Currently, the selection of the best set of beams (or fields) for a particular patient is determined by an iterative procedure that includes in each step a three-dimensional dose calculation for each beam configuration. The geometry is defined on the information obtained from the patient`s computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging images. Current clinical dose calculation codes generally rely on semiempirical methods that are fast and work well for geometrically simple problems but are less accurate for practical, geometrically complex problems. The best-known method that can cope with that kind of physical and geometric complexity is the Monte Carlo method. However, to solve dose calculation problems with reasonable statistical errors in individual voxels, the needed computation time is excessively large. As a result, Monte Carlo codes are not routinely used for clinical treatment planning. In this paper, we sketch a new approach for the three-dimensional dose computations designed for radiotherapy treatment planning based on the adjoint Monte Carlo method. The proposed approach is more accurate than empirical techniques and has the potential to be faster than current methods.
- OSTI ID:
- 436782
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-9606116--
- Journal Information:
- Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Journal Name: Transactions of the American Nuclear Society Vol. 74; ISSN TANSAO; ISSN 0003-018X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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