A deformable head and neck phantom with in-vivo dosimetry for adaptive radiotherapy quality assurance.

Purpose: Patients' interfractional anatomic changes can compromise the initial treatment plan quality. To overcome this issue, adaptive radiotherapy (ART) has been introduced. Deformable image registration (DIR) is an important tool for ART and several deformable phantoms have been built to evaluate the algorithms' accuracy.

Automatic commissioning of a GPU-based Monte Carlo radiation dose calculation code for photon radiotherapy.

Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is commonly considered as the most accurate method for radiation dose calculations. Commissioning of a beam model in the MC code against a clinical linear accelerator beam is of crucial importance for its clinical implementation. In this paper, we propose an automatic commissioning method for our GPU-based MC dose engine, gDPM.

Comprehensive evaluations of cone-beam CT dose in image-guided radiation therapy via GPU-based Monte Carlo simulations.

Cone beam CT (CBCT) has been widely used for patient setup in image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT). Radiation dose from CBCT scans has become a clinical concern. The purposes of this study are (1) to commission a graphics processing unit (GPU)-based Monte Carlo (MC) dose calculation package gCTD for Varian On-Board Imaging (OBI) system and test the calculation accuracy, and (2) to quantitatively evaluate CBCT dose from the OBI system in typical IGRT scan protocols.

Automatic treatment plan re-optimization for adaptive radiotherapy guided with the initial plan DVHs.

Adaptive radiation therapy (ART) can reduce normal tissue toxicity and/or improve tumor control through treatment adaptations based on the current patient anatomy. Developing an efficient and effective re-planning algorithm is an important step toward the clinical realization of ART. For the re-planning process, manual trial-and-error approach to fine-tune planning parameters is time-consuming and is usually considered unpractical, especially for online ART.

GPU-based Monte Carlo radiotherapy dose calculation using phase-space sources.

A novel phase-space source implementation has been designed for graphics processing unit (GPU)-based Monte Carlo dose calculation engines. Short of full simulation of the linac head, using a phase-space source is the most accurate method to model a clinical radiation beam in dose calculations. However, in GPU-based Monte Carlo dose calculations where the computation efficiency is very high, the time required to read and process a large phase-space file becomes comparable to the particle transport time.

Effect of statistical fluctuation in Monte Carlo based photon beam dose calculation on gamma index evaluation.

The γ-index test has been commonly adopted to quantify the degree of agreement between a reference dose distribution and an evaluation dose distribution. Monte Carlo (MC) simulation has been widely used for the radiotherapy dose calculation for both clinical and research purposes. The goal of this work is to investigate both theoretically and experimentally the impact of the MC statistical fluctuation on the γ-index test when the fluctuation exists in the reference, the evaluation, or both dose distributions.

Optimal surface marker locations for tumor motion estimation in lung cancer radiotherapy.

Using fiducial markers on the patient's body surface to predict the tumor location is a widely used approach in lung cancer radiotherapy. The purpose of this work is to propose an algorithm that automatically identifies a sparse set of locations on the patient's surface with the optimal prediction power for the tumor motion. In our algorithm, it is assumed that there is a linear relationship between the surface marker motion and the tumor motion.

GPU-based fast Monte Carlo simulation for radiotherapy dose calculation.

Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is commonly considered to be the most accurate dose calculation method in radiotherapy. However, its efficiency still requires improvement for many routine clinical applications. In this paper, we present our recent progress toward the development of a graphics processing unit (GPU)-based MC dose calculation package, gDPM v2.