title: GRID-ENABLED TREATMENT PLANNING FOR PROTON THERAPY USING MONTE CARLO SIMULATIONS.
abstract: Grid computing is an emerging technology that enables computational tasks to be accomplished in a collaborative approach by using a distributed network of computers. The grid approach is especially important for computationally intensive problems that are not tractable with a single computer or even with a small cluster of computers, e.g., radiation transport calculations for cancer therapy. The objective of this work was to extend a Monte Carlo (MC) transport code used for proton radiotherapy to utilize grid computing techniques and demonstrate its promise in reducing runtime from days to minutes. As proof of concept we created the Medical Grid between Texas Tech University and Rice University. Preliminary computational experiments were carried out in the GEANT4 simulation environment for transport of 25 ×106200 MeV protons in a prostate cancer treatment plan. The simulation speedup was approximately linear; deviations were attributed to the spectrum of parallel runtimes and communication overhead due to Medical Grid computing. The results indicate that ~3 × 105to 5 × 105proton events with processor core would result in 65 to 83% efficiency. Extrapolation of our results indicates that about 103processor cores of the class used here would reduce the MC simulation runtime from 18.3 days to ~1 h.
authors.affiliation: Texas Tech University, High Performance Computing Center, Box 41167 Lubbock, Texas 79409-1167.
authors.forename: Ravi
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Vadapalli
authors.affiliation: Rice University, Department of Physics and Astronomy, MS 315, 6100 Main Street Houston, Texas 77005.
authors.forename: Pablo
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Yepes
authors.affiliation: The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, Department of Radiation Physics Unit 1202, 1515 Holcombe Boulevard, Houston, Texas 77030.
authors.forename: Wayne
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Newhauser
authors.affiliation: Texas Tech University, Department of Physics, Box 41051, Lubbock, Texas 79409-1051.
authors.forename: Roger
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lichti
keywords: Monte Carlo method; grid computing runtime; radiation therapy