Program Information
A 3D Solver of Linear Boltzmann Transport Equation Based On a New Angular Discretization Method with Positivity for Photon Dose Calculation Benchmarked with Geant4
X Hong*, H Gao , Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, Shanghai
Presentations
TH-E-BRE-1 Thursday 1:00PM - 2:50PM Room: Ballroom EPurpose: The Linear Boltzmann Transport Equation (LBTE) solved through statistical Monte Carlo (MC) method provides the accurate dose calculation in radiotherapy. This work is to investigate the alternative way for accurately solving LBTE using deterministic numerical method due to its possible advantage in computational speed from MC.
Methods: Instead of using traditional spherical harmonics to approximate angular scattering kernel, our deterministic numerical method directly computes angular scattering weights, based on a new angular discretization method that utilizes linear finite element method on the local triangulation of unit angular sphere. As a result, our angular discretization method has the unique advantage in positivity, i.e., to maintain all scattering weights non-negative all the time, which is physically correct. Moreover, our method is local in angular space, and therefore handles the anisotropic scattering well, such as the forward-peaking scattering.
To be compatible with image-guided radiotherapy, the spatial variables are discretized on the structured grid with the standard diamond scheme. After discretization, the improved source-iteration method is utilized for solving the linear system without saving the linear system to memory.
The accuracy of our 3D solver is validated using analytic solutions and benchmarked with Geant4, a popular MC solver.
Results: The differences between Geant4 solutions and our solutions were less than 1.5% for various testing cases that mimic the practical cases. More details are available in the supporting document.
Conclusion: We have developed a 3D LBTE solver based on a new angular discretization method that guarantees the positivity of scattering weights for physical correctness, and it has been benchmarked with Geant4 for photon dose calculation.
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