A preliminary comparative study of two treatment planning systems developed for boron neutron capture therapy:...

Two treatment planning systems have been specifically developed for BNCT: MacNCTPlan by the Harvard-MIT group and the SERA system developed by the INEEL/Montana State University group. In order to compare the dose components computed by the treatment planning systems, and therefore the clinical results available, it is important to first compare the basic features of the codes. This study investigated the effect of the reconstruction techniques and the form of the cross-section libraries used by the two treatment planning systems on the thermal neutron fluence distributions. Six mono-directional neutron sources of 0.0253 eV, 1 keV, 5 keV, 10 keV, 100 keV, and 1 MeV were directed onto simple geometric phantoms filled with water. The general-purpose Monte Carlo radiation transport code MCNP was used as a reference tool in this study. For the examples studied, it is found that the methods used for geometry representation (in MacNCTPlan) and for cross-section representation (in SERA) were found to impact directly on the accuracy of the calculated results.