high performance computing on graphics processing units: hgpu.org

In radiotherapy, dose calculation is one of the most important and computationally intensive stages needed in a cancer treatment planning. During current clinical cancer treatment, the dose is calculated before the first treatment session and it will continue until the end of the therapy. However, tumours may change during the treatment and it is needed a re-calculation of the dose. Online Adaptive Radiotherapy (ART) is a technique that promises to deliver an optimal dose according to the necessity of the patient anatomy. Unfortunately, this technique is not possible yet due to technical limitations. One of those limitations is the time needed to recalculate the new dose to be delivered. Finite Size Pencil Beam algorithm seems to provide the requirements to fit in this technique as it is a fast, accurate enough and very suitable to run on graphics processing units (GPUs). Here we have investigated the advantages and capacities of using GPUs for cancer treatment planning based on a pencil beam algorithm. The investigation has been carried out on a Nvidia Tesla C2050 and we have achieved an speedup of nearly 200 times what clearly demonstrates that GPUs are an attractive solution towards the vision of online ART.