Program Information

Commissioning of the MC2 Monte Carlo Dose Computation Engine

U Titt

U Titt¹*, D Mirkovic¹ , A Liu¹ , A Anand² , L Perles³ , G Ciangaru¹ , R Mohan¹ , (1) MD Anderson Cancer Center, (2) Mayo Clinic Arizona, Phoenix, ,(3) Scripps Proton Therapy Center, San Diego, CA

Presentations

SU-E-T-584 Sunday 3:00PM - 6:00PM Room: Exhibit Hall

Purpose: An automated system, MC2, was developed to convert DICOM proton therapy treatment plans into a sequence MCNPX input files, and submit these to a computing cluster. MC2 converts the results into DICOM format, and any treatment planning system can import the data for comparison vs. conventional dose predictions. This work describes the data and the efforts made to validate the MC2 system against measured dose profiles and how the system was calibrated to predict the correct number of monitor units (MUs) to deliver the prescribed dose.

Methods: A set of simulated lateral and longitudinal profiles was compared to data measured for commissioning purposes and during annual quality assurance efforts. Acceptance criteria were relative dose differences smaller than 3% and differences in range (in water) of less than 2 mm.
For two out of three double scattering beam lines validation results were already published. Spot checks were performed to assure proper performance. For the small snout, all available measurements were used for validation vs. simulated data. To calibrate the dose per MU, the energy deposition per source proton at the center of the spread out Bragg peaks (SOBPs) was recorded for a set of SOBPs from each option. Subsequently these were then scaled to the results of dose per MU determination based on published methods.
The simulations of the doses in the magnetically scanned beam line were also validated vs. measured longitudinal and lateral profiles. The source parameters were fine tuned to achieve maximum agreement with measured data. The dosimetric calibration was performed by scoring energy deposition per proton, and scaling the results to a standard dose measurement of a 10 x 10 x 10 cm3 volume irradiation using 100 MU.


Results: All simulated data passed the acceptance criteria.

Conclusion: MC2 is fully validated and ready for clinical application.


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