Publications by authors named "Danairis Hernandez Morales"
Article Synopsis
- Monte Carlo (MC) simulations enhance the accuracy of proton therapy dose calculations but are slow, which GPUs can help speed up, although they face issues like thread divergence due to secondary particle generation.
- A new approach called virtual particle Monte Carlo (VPMC) is introduced, which simplifies dose calculations by avoiding direct simulation of secondary particles, thus optimizing GPU performance.
- The VPMC method was validated against existing simulations in both phantoms and patient geometries, showing comparable accuracy in dose calculations while maintaining efficient computations.
Article Synopsis
- - The study aims to create an online Monte Carlo-based workflow for adaptive radiation therapy using GPU acceleration to better manage anatomical changes in patients receiving proton therapy with pencil beam scanning.
- - The workflow includes four key steps: deformable image registration to align CT scans, dose calculation on updated scans, plan reoptimization based on verification dose, and patient-specific quality assurance before and after treatment.
- - The evaluation methods for the workflow's effectiveness include various similarity metrics for contour accuracy and 3D gamma analysis to verify dose accuracy, tested on three patients across different disease sites.
Purpose: To measure diode sensitivity degradation (DSD) induced by cumulative proton dose delivered to a commercial daily quality assurance (QA) device.
Methods: At our institution, six Daily QA 3 (DQA3, Sun Nuclear Corporation, Melbourne, FL, USA) devices have been used for daily proton pencil beam scanning QA in four proton gantry rooms over a span of 4 years. DQA3 diode counts were cross-calibrated using a homogenous field with a known dose of 1 Gy.
Purpose: The multiple energy extraction (MEE) delivery technique for synchrotron-based proton delivery systems reduces beam delivery time by decelerating the beam multiple times during one accelerator spill, but this might cause additional plan quality degradation due to intrafractional motion. We seek to determine whether MEE causes significantly different plan quality degradation compared to single energy extraction (SEE) for lung cancer treatments due to the interplay effect.
Methods: Ten lung cancer patients treated with IMPT at our institution were nonrandomly sampled based on a representative range of tumor motion amplitudes, tumor volumes, and respiratory periods.
Purpose: To describe and validate the dose calculation algorithm of an independent second-dose check software for spot scanning proton delivery systems with full width at half maximum between 5 and 14 mm and with a negligible spray component.
Methods: The analytical dose engine of our independent second-dose check software employs an altered pencil beam algorithm with 3 lateral Gaussian components. It was commissioned using Geant4 and validated by comparison to point dose measurements at several depths within spread-out Bragg peaks of varying ranges, modulations, and field sizes.
Purpose: At our institution, all proton patient plans undergo patient-specific quality assurance (PSQA) prior to treatment delivery. For intensity-modulated proton beam therapy, quality assurance is complex and time consuming, and it may involve multiple measurements per field. We reviewed our PSQA workflow and identified the steps that could be automated and developed solutions to improve efficiency.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The range shifter (RS) is used to treat shallow tumors for a proton pencil beam scanning system (PBS). Adding RS certainly complicates the commissioning of the treatment planning system (TPS) because the spot sizes are significantly enlarged with RS. In this work, we present an efficient method to configure a commercial TPS for a PBS system with a fixed RS.
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