PRIMO: A graphical environment for the Monte Carlo simulation of Varian and Elekta linacs

摘要

It is widely accepted that the Monte Carlo method applied to the simulation of radiation transport is able to compute accurate results in radiotherapy problems [8, 13]. However, general purpose Monte Carlo codes for radiation transport usually require exceedingly long simulation times to reduce the statistical uncertainty to acceptable levels. For clinical applications, several codes-in which approximations to the physical interaction and transport models were introduced-have been developed to overcome this limitation [6,10, 12,19, 21]. These codes lead to a gain in simulation speed at the expense of reducing the accuracy of the results or limiting the range of applicability. A further limitation for the implementation in clinical routine has been the difficulty and effort entailed in preparing, executing, and analyzing a simulation.