A common approach to implementing the Monte Carlo method for the calculation of brachytherapy radiation dose deposition is to use a phase space file containing information on particles emitted from a brachytherapy source. However, the loading of the phase space file during the dose calculation consumes a large amount of computer random access memory, imposing a higher requirement for computer hardware. In this study, we propose a method to parameterize the information (e.g., particle location, direction and energy) stored in the phase space file by using several probability distributions. This method was implemented for dose calculations of a commercial Ir-192 high dose rate source. Dose calculation accuracy of the parameterized source was compared to the results observed using the full phase space file in a simple water phantom and in a clinical breast cancer case. The results showed the parameterized source at a size of 200 kB was as accurate as the phase space file represented source of 1.1 GB. By using the parameterized source representation, a compact Monte Carlo job can be designed, which allows an easy setup for parallel computing in brachytherapy planning. © 2014 Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine.
CITATION STYLE
Zhang, M., Zou, W., Chen, T., Kim, L., Khan, A., Haffty, B., & Yue, N. J. (2014). Parameterization of brachytherapy source phase space file for Monte Carlo-based clinical brachytherapy dose calculation. Physics in Medicine and Biology, 59(2), 455–464. https://doi.org/10.1088/0031-9155/59/2/455
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