A Monte Carlo based radiotherapy simulator

This paper presents a Monte Carlo based simulator of the radiotherapy treatment chain. The high energy simulation module (HESM) incorporates components for beam generation, irradiation set up, radiation transport modeling and dose distribution calculation. The beam is defined by means of particle charge, energy, direction and position. Comprehensive modeling of photon and electron interactions in the radiotherapy energy range has been pursued. A three-dimensional dose matrix is used to calculate the energy deposited by electrons and photons. The simulator was evaluated in terms of its accuracy of computation of 3D photon and electron beam dose distributions, by means of comparison to reported Monte Carlo studies and also to experimental data, using homogeneous and heterogeneous phantoms. The dose distribution studies demonstrated good agreement with experimental and reference data. Furthermore, the HESM has been augmented by means of an already available user-friendly GUI and a suit of modeling tools, to become a complete Monte Carlo radiotherapy simulator (MCRTS), for use in experimentation in general and specific radiotherapy applications. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.