Efficient photon beam dose calculations using DOSXYZnrc with BEAMnrc

This study examines the efficiencies of doses calculated using DOSXYZnrc for 18 MV (10 X 10 cm2 field size) and 6 MV (10 X 10 cm2 and 20 X 20 cm2 field sizes) photon beams simulated using BEAMnrc. Both phase-space sources and full BEAMnrc simulation sources are used in the DOSXYZnrc calculations. BEAMnrc simulation sources consist of a BEAMnrc accelerator simulation compiled as a shared library and run by the user code (DOSXYZnrc in this case) to generate source particles. Their main advantage is in eliminating the need to store intermediate phase-space files. In addition, the efficiency improvements due to photon splitting and particle recycling in the DOSXYZnrc simulation are examined. It is found that photon splitting increases dose calculation efficiency by a factor of up to 6.5, depending on beam energy, field size, voxel size, and the type of secondary collimation used in the BEAMnrc simulation (multileaf collimator vs photon jaws). The optimum efficiency with photon splitting is approximately 55% higher than that with particle recycling, indicating that, while most of the gain is due to time saved by reusing source particle data, there is significant gain due to the uniform distribution of interaction sites and faster DOSXYZnrc simulation time when photon splitting is employed. Use of optimized directional bremsstrahlung splitting in the BEAMnrc simulation sources increases the efficiency of photon beam simulations sufficiently that the peak efficiencies (i.e., with optimum setting of the photon splitting number) of DOSXYZnrc simulations using these sources are only 3-13% lower than those with phase-space file sources. This points towards eliminating the need for storing intermediate phase-space files.