Full Monte Carlo (FMC) calculation of dose distribution has been recognized to have superior accuracy, compared with the pencil beam algorithm (PBA). However, since the FMC methods require long calculation time, it is difficult to apply them to routine treatment planning at present. In order to improve the situation, a simplified Monte Carlo (SMC) method has been introduced to the dose kernel c...

ID: 17560 Title: Comparison Between the Dose Distributions Calculated for Lung Cancer Patients Using Pencil Beam and Collapsed Cone Convolution Algorithms Comparison Between the Dose Distributions Calculated for Lung Cancer Patients Using Pencil Beam and Collapsed Cone Convolution Algorithms Introduction: The initial patient plans were developed by Novalis’s BrainSCAN treatment planning system ...

A fast algorithm is constructed to facilitate dose calculation for a large number of randomly sampled treatment scenarios, each representing a possible realisation of a full treatment with geometric, fraction specific displacements for an arbitrary number of fractions. The algorithm is applied to construct a dose volume coverage probability map (DVCM) based on dose calculated for several hundre...

A commercial electron Monte Carlo (eMC) dose calculation algorithm has become available in Eclipse treatment planning system. The purpose of this work was to evaluate the eMC algorithm and investigate the clinical implementation of this system. The beam modeling of the eMC algorithm was performed for beam energies of 6, 9, 12, 16, and 20 MeV for a Varian Trilogy and all available applicator siz...

A methodology for the concurrent optimization of beam orientations and beam weights in conformal radiotherapy treatment planning has been developed and tested on a cohort of five patients. The algorithm is based on a beam-weight optimization scheme with a downhill simplex optimization engine. The use of random voxels in the dose calculation provides much of the required speed up in the optimiza...

There are an increasing number of radiation therapy patients with hip prosthesis. The common method of minimizing treatment planning inaccuracies is to avoid radiation beams to transit through the prosthesis. However, the beams often exit through them, especially when the patient has a double-prosthesis. Modern treatment planning systems employ algorithms with improved dose calculation accuraci...

PURPOSE This article presents an improved pencil-beam dose calculation formalism based on an experimental kernel obtained by deconvolution. The new algorithm makes it possible to calculate the absorbed dose for all field sizes. METHODS The authors have enhanced their previous work [J. D. Azcona and J. Burguete, Med. Phys. 35, 248-259 (2008)] by correcting the kernel tail representing the cont...