A TRACK-REPEATING ALGORITHM FOR FAST MONTE CARLO DOSE CALCULATIONS OF PROTON RADIOTHERAPY

Monte Carlo codes are utilized for accurate dose calculations in proton radiation therapy research. While they are superior in accuracy to commonly used analytical dose calculations, they require significantly longer computation times. The aim of this work is to characterize a Monte Carlo track-repeating algorithm to increase computation speed without compromising dosimetric accuracy. The track-repeating approach reduced the CPU time required for a complete dose calculation in voxelized patient anatomy by more than two orders of magnitude, while on average reproducing the results from the traditional Monte Carlo approach within 4% dose difference and within 1-mm distance to agreement.