Development of a Full Monte Carlo Therapeutic Dose Calculation Toolkit for Halcyon Using Geant4

TL;DR

This paper presents the development and validation of a Monte Carlo dose calculation toolkit for the Halcyon radiotherapy system using Geant4, demonstrating high accuracy in water and patient phantoms for clinical plan verification.

Contribution

A novel Monte Carlo toolkit for Halcyon was developed and validated, enabling accurate secondary dose calculations and quality assurance in radiotherapy.

Findings

Lateral dose profiles and PDD curves matched measured data within ±2%.

IMRT dose calculations showed >95% gamma pass rate compared to TPS.

Toolkit performs well in water and patient CT phantoms.

Abstract

Purpose: To develop a Monte Carlo (MC) therapeutic dose calculation toolkit of a recently released ring gantry linac in Geant4 (Version 10.7) for secondary dose validation of radiotherapy plan. Methods: For the Halcyon (Varian Medical Systems), the DSMLC was modeled and radiation transport in DSMLC and patient phantom was simulated using Geant4. Radiation source was sampled from a phase space file for linac head above the DSMLC. The phase space file was obtained using a cloud-based Monte Carlo (MC) simulator, VirtuaLinac (VL) provide by Varian. Dosimetric profiles for different square field widths (2x2, 4x4, 6x6, 8x8, 10x10, 20x20, and 28x28 cm2), i.e., percent depth dose (PDD) curves and lateral profiles are simulated and compared against the experimental profiles. IMRT (intensity modulated radiation therapy) plans in two anatomical sites (prostate and brain) were also calculated using the developed toolkit and compared against the TPS calculated dose (Acuros, Eclipse 15.6). 3D dose difference and 3D gamma analysis were used to evaluate the simulation accuracy compared against the TPS calculated dose. Results: The simulated lateral dose profiles and PDD curves in water phantom match well with the measured ones for all the simulated field sizes with relative difference +-2%. For the prostate and brain IMRT plans, the simulated dose showed a good agreement with the TPS calculated dose. The 3D gamma pass rate (3%/3mm) are 98.08% and 95.4% for the two prostate and brain plans, respectively. Conclusion: The developed full MC dose calculation toolkit for Halcyon performs well in dose calculations in water phantom and patient CT phantom. The developed toolkit shows promising possibility for future secondary dose calculation for IMRT and serve as clinical quality assurance (QA) tool for Halcyon.