GPUMCD: a new GPU-oriented Monte Carlo dose calculation platform

Abstract

Purpose: Monte Carlo methods are considered the gold standard for dosimetric computations in radiotherapy. Their execution time is however still an obstacle to the routine use of Monte Carlo packages in a clinical setting. To address this problem, a completely new, and designed from the ground up for the GPU, Monte Carlo dose calculation package for voxelized geometries is proposed: GPUMCD. Method : GPUMCD implements a coupled photon-electron Monte Carlo simulation for energies in the range 0.01 MeV to 20 MeV. An analogue simulation of photon interactions is used and a Class II condensed history method has been implemented for the simulation of electrons. A new GPU random number generator, some divergence reduction methods as well as other optimization strategies are also described. GPUMCD was run on a NVIDIA GTX480 while single threaded implementations of EGSnrc and DPM were run on an Intel Core i7 860. Results : Dosimetric results obtained with GPUMCD were compared to EGSnrc. In all but one test case, 98% or more of all significant voxels passed a gamma criteria of 2%-2mm. In terms of execution speed and efficiency, GPUMCD is more than 900 times faster than EGSnrc and more than 200 times faster than DPM, a Monte Carlo package aiming fast executions. Absolute execution times of less than 0.3 s are found for the simulation of 1M electrons and 4M photons in water for monoenergetic beams of 15 MeV, including GPU-CPU memory transfers. Conclusion : GPUMCD, a new GPU-oriented Monte Carlo dose calculation platform, has been compared to EGSnrc and DPM in terms of dosimetric results and execution speed. Its accuracy and speed make it an interesting solution for full Monte Carlo dose calculation in radiation oncology.

Accepted for publication in Medical Physics

Cited by in corpus (11)

• GPU-based fast Monte Carlo simulation for radiotherapy dose calculation
• A GPU Tool for Efficient, Accurate, and Realistic Simulation of Cone Beam CT Projections
• Fast Monte Carlo Simulation for Patient-specific CT/CBCT Imaging Dose Calculation
• GPU-based Monte Carlo radiotherapy dose calculation using phase-space sources
• Comprehensive Evaluations of Cone-beam CT dose in Image-guided Radiation Therapy via GPU-based Monte Carlo simulations
• Effect of Statistical Fluctuation in Monte Carlo Based Photon Beam Dose Calculation on Gamma Index Evaluation
• Fast and accurate dose predictions for novel radiotherapy treatments in heterogeneous phantoms using conditional 3D-UNet generative adversarial networks
• Development of a GPU-accelerated Monte Carlo dose calculation module for nuclear medicine, ARCHER-NM: Demonstration for a PET/CT imaging procedure
• A graphics processor-based intranuclear cascade and evaporation simulation
• Exploring contrast generalisation in deep learning-based brain MRI-to-CT synthesis
• A Monte Carlo Volumetric-Ray-Casting Estimator for Global Fluence Tallies on GPUs