Development of a GPU-based Monte Carlo dose calculation code for coupled electron-photon transport
Department of Radiation Oncology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92037-0843, USA
Physics in Medicine and Biology, Volume 55, Issue 11, pp. 3077-3086 (2010), arXiv:0910.0329 [physics.med-ph] (2 Oct 2009)
@article{jia2010development,
title={Development of a GPU-based Monte Carlo dose calculation code for coupled electron–photon transport},
author={Jia, X. and Gu, X. and Sempau, J. and Choi, D. and Majumdar, A. and Jiang, S.B.},
journal={Physics in Medicine and Biology},
volume={55},
pages={3077},
year={2010},
publisher={IOP Publishing}
}
Monte Carlo simulation is the most accurate method for absorbed dose calculations in radiotherapy. Its efficiency still requires improvement for routine clinical applications, especially for online adaptive radiotherapy. In this paper, we report our recent development on a GPU-based Monte Carlo dose calculation code for coupled electron-photon transport. We have implemented the Dose Planning Method (DPM) Monte Carlo dose calculation package (Sempau et al, Phys. Med. Biol., 45(2000)2263-2291) on GPU architecture under CUDA platform. The implementation has been tested with respect to the original sequential DPM code on CPU in phantoms with water-lung-water or water-bone-water slab geometry. A 20 MeV mono-energetic electron point source or a 6 MV photon point source is used in our validation. The results demonstrate adequate accuracy of our GPU implementation for both electron and photon beams in radiotherapy energy range. Speed up factors of about 5.0 ~ 6.6 times have been observed, using an NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPU card against a 2.27GHz Intel Xeon CPU processor.
November 13, 2010 by hgpu
