Development of a GPU-based Monte Carlo dose calculation code for coupled electron-photon transport

TL;DR

This paper presents a GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo dose calculation code for coupled electron-photon transport in radiotherapy, achieving significant speed improvements while maintaining accuracy, facilitating more efficient clinical applications.

Contribution

The authors adapted the Dose Planning Method Monte Carlo code to GPU architecture using CUDA, enabling faster dose calculations for radiotherapy without compromising accuracy.

Findings

Achieved 5.0 to 6.6 times speedup on GPU compared to CPU.

Validated GPU implementation maintains accuracy for electron and photon beams.

Demonstrated potential for real-time adaptive radiotherapy applications.

Abstract

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.