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A GPU-Based Pencil Beam Algorithm for Dose Calculations in Proton Radiation Therapy

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G Kalantzis

G Kalantzis1*, T Leventouri1 , H Tachibana3 , C Shang4 , (1) Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL, (2) National Cancer Center Hospital East, Kashiwa, Chiba, (3) Boca Raton Community Hospital, Boca Raton, FL

Presentations

SU-E-T-37 (Sunday, July 12, 2015) 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM Room: Exhibit Hall


Purpose:Recent developments in radiation therapy have been focused on applications of charged particles, especially protons. Over the years several dose calculation methods have been proposed in proton therapy. A common characteristic of all these methods is their extensive computational burden. In the current study we present for the first time, to our best knowledge, a GPU-based PBA for proton dose calculations in Matlab.

Methods:In the current study we employed an analytical expression for the protons depth dose distribution. The central-axis term is taken from the broad-beam central-axis depth dose in water modified by an inverse square correction while the distribution of the off-axis term was considered Gaussian. The serial code was implemented in MATLAB and was launched on a desktop with a quad core Intel Xeon X5550 at 2.67GHz with 8 GB of RAM. For the parallelization on the GPU, the parallel computing toolbox was employed and the code was launched on a GTX 770 with Kepler architecture. The performance comparison was established on the speedup factors.

Results:The performance of the GPU code was evaluated for three different energies: low (50 MeV), medium (100 MeV) and high (150 MeV). Four square fields were selected for each energy, and the dose calculations were performed with both the serial and parallel codes for a homogeneous water phantom with size 300x300x300 mm3. The resolution of the PBs was set to 1.0 mm. The maximum speedup of ~127 was achieved for the highest energy and the largest field size.

Conclusion:A GPU-based PB algorithm for proton dose calculations in Matlab was presented. A maximum speedup of ~127 was achieved. Future directions of the current work include extension of our method for dose calculation in heterogeneous phantoms.


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