Application of Monte Carlo to proton beam radiation therapy

As with photon and electron radiotherapy, the future of dose calculation for hadron beams will be based upon Monte Carlo algorithms. Benchmark calculations of the LAHET Monte Carlo code with respect to measured in-phantom dose distributions show that the proton physics modules in LAHET accurately reproduce measured results. Since MCNP-X incorporates the proton and high energy neutron physics modules from LAHET, similar agreement with MCNP-X is expected. In addition to beam-line simulations, MCNP-X has the ability to input the lattice geometry required for simulating patient treatments based on CT data sets. The ability of MCNP-X to perform patient dose calculation simulations for proton radiotherapy was demonstrated by simulating a two-beam prostate treatment plan. While MCNP-X is fully capable to perform patient-planning calculations, currently, it is too time consuming to be used for routine patient planning.