Vega library for processing DICOM data required in Monte Carlo verification of radiotherapy treatment plans

TL;DR

The paper introduces Vega, a lightweight, platform-independent C++ library for extracting and writing DICOM data essential for Monte Carlo dose calculations in radiotherapy treatment plan verification.

Contribution

It presents a novel, flexible DICOM interface library that simplifies MC data extraction and dose distribution handling in treatment planning workflows.

Findings

Vega effectively extracts all MC required data from DICOM files.

The library can write dose distributions into DICOM format compatible with treatment planning systems.

Vega is platform-independent and easy to integrate into existing workflows.

Abstract

Monte Carlo (MC) methods provide the most accurate to-date dose calculations in heterogeneous media and complex geometries, and this spawns increasing interest in incorporating MC calculations into treatment planning quality assurance process. This involves MC dose calculations for clinically produced treatment plans. To perform these calculations, a number of treatment plan parameters specifying radiation beam and patient geometries need to be transferred to MC codes, such as BEAMnrc and DOSXYZnrc. Extracting these parameters from DICOM files is not a trivial task, one that has previously been performed mostly using Matlab-based software. This paper describes the DICOM tags that contain information required for MC modeling of conformal and IMRT plans, and reports the development of an in-house DICOM interface, through a library (named Vega) of platform-independent, object-oriented C++ codes. The Vega library is small and succinct, offering just the fundamental functions for reading/modifying/writing DICOM files in a C++ program. The library, however, is flexible enough to extract all MC required data from DICOM files, and write MC produced dose distributions into DICOM files that can then be processed in a treatment planning system environment. The library can be made available upon request to the authors.