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Fast Monte Carlo Electron-Photon Transport Code Using Hardware Accelerators: Preliminary Results for Brachytherapy and Radionuclide Therapy Cases
L Su*, X Du, T Liu, X Xu, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst., Troy, NY
MO-D-108-8 Monday 2:00PM - 3:50PM Room: 108Purpose: Although Monte Carlo methods provide the most accurate radiation dose calculation for medical physics applications, long simulation time remains an impediment for its routine utilization. An electron-photon coupled Monte Carlo code ARCHER - Accelerated Radiation-transport Computations in Heterogeneous EnviRonments - is being developed at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute as a software testbed for emerging heterogeneous high performance computers that utilize accelerators such as GPUs. This paper describes the development of ARCHER and demonstrates its preliminary applications involving brachytherapy and radionuclide therapy.
Methods: In ARCHER code electron transport was modeled by mixed condensed history method. Photon transport was simulated in analog. The energy range handled was from 10 keV to 30 MeV. The hardware platform involved a desktop with Intel Xeon X5660 CPU and six NVIDIA Tesla™ M2090 GPUs. ARCHER was benchmarked against MCNPX and EGSnrc on slab geometry. In addition, we used ARCHER to calculate Ir-192 brachytherapy dose distribution and to evaluate Y-90 beta SAF in radionuclide therapy.
Results:The depth dose and lateral dose at different depth were tallied and compared with results from MCNPX and EGSnrc. For 99.1% of all tested voxels, the dose difference between ARCHER and EGSnrc was within 2% of the dose maximum. In the brachytherapy calculation, all the major organ doses from ARCHER matched those from MCNPX within statistical error. In the Y-90 internal source case, ARCHER gave similar SAF value with MCNPX. Meanwhile the simulation speed was 2~3 orders faster than MCNPX and EGS using single GPU. With multiple GPUs, the simulation time can be decreased almost linearly.
Conclusion:We developed an electron photon coupled Monte Carlo code ARCHER. Preliminary testing showed good agreement with prevailing general purpose codes, while its speed was hundreds even thousands times faster. We are working on applying ARCHER to Brachytherapy and radionuclide therapy and have encouraging preparatory result.
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