A treatment planning code for inverse planning and 3D optimization in hadrontherapy.

Area of Science:

• Medical Physics
• Radiation Oncology
• Computational Biology

Background:

• Hadron therapy, particularly with carbon ions, offers precise dose delivery but requires advanced treatment planning systems (TPS) due to unique energy deposition characteristics.
• Conformal dose delivery is crucial for maximizing therapeutic efficacy and minimizing damage to healthy tissues in particle therapy.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate ANCOD++, an analytical treatment planning system (TPS) for optimizing conformal physical dose distributions in proton and carbon ion therapy.
• To evaluate the accuracy of ANCOD++ in delivering precise radiation doses to target volumes while sparing critical structures.

Main Methods:

• Development of ANCOD++, an analytical code utilizing the voxel-scan technique and an iterative algorithm for optimal fluence determination.
• Integration of Monte Carlo simulations (GEANT3) for generating physical lookup tables and verifying treatment plans.
• Implementation on a Unix/Linux platform using C++ for efficient computation.

Main Results:

• ANCOD++ successfully determined optimal beam fluences for conformal dose distributions in proton and carbon ion therapy.
• Dose verification through full Monte Carlo simulations showed good agreement with ANCOD++ treatment planning calculations.
• The system demonstrated the ability to maximize dose to the target volume and minimize dose to critical structures.

Conclusions:

• ANCOD++ is a validated treatment planning system capable of optimizing physical dose distributions for proton and carbon ion therapy.
• The developed TPS provides a robust tool for precise dose delivery, laying the groundwork for future radiobiological evaluations.
• Further research will focus on the radiobiological assessment of equivalent biological doses using this validated physical dose calculation framework.