GPU-based ultra-fast dose calculation using a finite size pencil beam model.
Online adaptive radiation therapy (ART) is an attractive concept that promises the ability to deliver an optimal treatment in response to the inter-fraction variability in patient anatomy. However, it has yet to be realized due to technical limitations. Fast dose deposit coefficient calculation is a critical component of the online planning process that is required for plan optimization of intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). Computer graphics processing units (GPUs) are well suited to provide the requisite fast performance for the data-parallel nature of dose calculation. In this work, we develop a dose calculation engine based on a finite-size pencil beam (FSPB) algorithm and a GPU parallel computing framework. The developed framework can accommodate any FSPB model. We test our implementation in the case of a water phantom and the case of a prostate cancer patient with varying beamlet and voxel sizes. All testing scenarios achieved speedup ranging from 200 to 400 times when using a NVIDIA Tesla C1060 card in comparison with a 2.27 GHz Intel Xeon CPU. The computational time for calculating dose deposition coefficients for a nine-field prostate IMRT plan with this new framework is less than 1 s. This indicates that the GPU-based FSPB algorithm is well suited for online re-planning for adaptive radiotherapy.
Department of Radiation Oncology, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92037-0843, USA.
Xuejun
X
Gu
Dongju
D
Choi
Chunhua
C
Men
Hubert
H
Pan
Amitava
A
Majumdar
Steve B
SB
Jiang
D000465:Algorithms; D003196:Computer Graphics; D003201:Computers; D003205:Computing Methodologies; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015233:Models, Statistical; D011471:Prostatic Neoplasms / Q000532:radiotherapy*; D011878:Radiotherapy / Q000379:methods; D011879:Radiotherapy Dosage; D011880:Radiotherapy Planning, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D050397:Radiotherapy, Intensity-Modulated / Q000379:methods*; D012984:Software; D014584:User-Computer Interface