Development and application of a GPU-based fast electron-photon coupled Monte Carlo code for radiation therapy

Abstract

The benchmark results showed good agreement between ARCHER and EGSnrc. For clinical cases, with the 2%/2mm criteria, the gamma test passing rates for the prostate, lung case and head & neck cases are 99.7%, 98.5% and 97.2%, respectively. Meanwhile, ARCHER achieved a fast speed for PSF-based dose calculations. With a single M2090 card, the simulations took about 60, 50, 80 seconds for three cases, respectively, with 1% statistical error in the PTV. Using the latest K40 GPU card, the simulation times were further reduced by 1.7-1.8. When six M2090 cards were used, the total computing time was 8.9-13.4 seconds. For comparison, the same simulations on Intel E5-2620 (12 hyper-threads) cost about 500~800 seconds. In conclu-sion, ARCHER for RT was developed successfully to perform fast and accurate MC dose calculation for radiotherapy using PSFs and patient CT phantoms.