CT based 3D Monte Carlo radiation therapy treatment planning

This paper outlines the "voxel reconstruction" technique used to model the macroscopic human anatomy of the cranial, abdominal and cervical regions directly from CT scans. Tissue composition, density, and radiation transport characteristics were assigned to each individual volume element (voxel) automatically depending on its greyscale number and physical location. Both external beam and brachytherapy treatment techniques were simulated using the Monte Carlo radiation transport code MCNP (Monte Carlo N-Particle) version 3A. To obtain a high resolution dose calculation, yet not overly extend computational times, variable voxel sizes have been introduced. In regions of interest where high attention to anatomical detail and dose calculation was required, the voxel dimensions were reduced to a few millimetres. In less important regions that only influence the region of interest via scattered radiation, the voxel dimensions were increased to the scale of centimetres. With the use of relatively old (1991) supercomputing hardware, dose calculations were performed in under 10 hours to a standard deviation of 5% in each voxel with a resolution of a few millimetres--current hardware should substantially improve these figures. It is envisaged that with coupled photon/electron transport incorporated into MCNP version 4A and 4B, conventional photon and electron treatment planning will be undertaken using this technique, in addition to neutron and associated photon dosimetry presented here.