title: A fast Monte Carlo code for proton transport in radiation therapy based on MCNPX.
abstract: An important requirement for proton therapy is a software for dose calculation. Monte Carlo is the most accurate method for dose calculation, but it is very slow. In this work, a method is developed to improve the speed of dose calculation. The method is based on pre-generated tracks for particle transport. The MCNPX code has been used for generation of tracks. A set of data including the track of the particle was produced in each particular material (water, air, lung tissue, bone, and soft tissue). This code can transport protons in wide range of energies (up to 200 MeV for proton). The validity of the fast Monte Carlo (MC) code is evaluated with data MCNPX as a reference code. While analytical pencil beam algorithm transport shows great errors (up to 10%) near small high density heterogeneities, there was less than 2% deviation of MCNPX results in our dose calculation and isodose distribution. In terms of speed, the code runs 200 times faster than MCNPX. In the Fast MC code which is developed in this work, it takes the system less than 2 minutes to calculate dose for 10(6) particles in an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHZ desktop computer.
authors.affiliation: Department of Medical Physics and Engineering, School of Medicine, Isfahan University of Medical Sciences, Isfahan, Iran.
authors.forename: Keyvan
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Jabbari
authors.affiliation: Medical Physics Unit, McGill University Health Center, Montréal, Québec, Canada.
authors.forename: Jan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Seuntjens
keywords: Monte Carlo; proton therapy; treatment planning