MCNP speed advances for boron neutron capture therapy

The Boron Neutron Capture Therapy (BNCT) treatment planning process of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center-M.I.T team relies on MCNP to determine dose rates in the subject`s head for various beam orientations. In this time consuming computational process, four or five potential beams are investigated. Of these, one or two final beams are selected and thoroughly evaluated. Recent advances greatly decreased the time needed to do these MCNP calculations. Two modifications to the new MCNP4B source code, lattice tally and tracking enhancements, reduced the wall-clock run times of a typical one million source neutrons run to one hour twenty five minutes on a 200 MHz Pentium Pro computer running Linux and using the GNU FORTRAN compiler. Previously these jobs used a special version of MCNP4AB created by Everett Redmond, which completed in two hours two minutes. In addition to this 30% speedup, the MCNP4B version was adapted for use with Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) on personal computers running the Linux operating system. MCNP, using PVM, can be run on multiple computers simultaneously, offering a factor of speedup roughly the same as the number of computers used. With two 200 MHz Pentium Pro machines, the run time was reduced to forty five minutes, a 1.9 factor of improvement over the single Linux computer. While the time of a single run was greatly reduced, the advantages associated with PVM derive from using computational power not already used. Four possible beams, currently requiring four separate runs, could be run faster when each is individually run on a single machine under Windows NT, rather than using Linux and PVM to run one after another with each multiprocessed across four computers. It would be advantageous, however, to use PVM to distribute the final two beam orientations over four computers

SU‐FF‐T‐378: Radiation Transport Software for Medical Physics Studies

Purpose: To present a summary of radiation transport software for medical physics applications. Method and Materials: The Radiation Safety Information Computational Center (RSICC), a center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), is the Department of Energy software center for radiation transport and safety software. The center houses over 1600 software packages and nuclear cross section data of importance to nuclear science applications. The different software packages have been applied to the following topics: • Dosimetry calculations for radiation therapy • Treatment planning in radiation oncology • Design of photon and secondary neutron shielding for therapy rooms • Evaluating and estimating patient and staff radiation dose • Electron beam transport and energy deposition • Secondary neutron and gamma transport and energy deposition • Cancer brachytherapy dosimetry • Medical diagnostic imaging applications, including SPECT, PET, and x‐ray imaging • Error evaluations for accelerator particle delivery systems • Modalities of treatment and exploration of alternatives • Licensing and safety analysis for medical radiation facilities • Medical diagnostics and therapy Examples of software in the RSICC collection include MCNP/MCNPX, ITS, ANISN, TORT, EGS4, PARTISN, SERA, and PENELOPE. There are other software packages (not available through RSICC), which have been applied to the above topics ‐ for example, PENTRAN, A3MCNP, ATTILA, COMET, EGSnrc, TransMED, EVENT, FLUKA, PEREGRINE. Results: Studies on selected software is presented, particularly on the above applications. Conclusion: As the field of medical physics advances, computer software technology continues on the road to improvement and efficiency. Conflict of Interest: Work was supported by the Department of Energy under contract DE‐AC05‐00OR22725. © 2006, American Association of Physicists in Medicine. All rights reserved