Treatment plan evaluation for interstitial photodynamic therapy in a mouse model by Monte Carlo simulation with FullMonte

Frontiers in Physics

Cassidy, Jeffrey¹  Betz, Vaughn¹  Lilge, Lothar² 

[1] Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada;Princess Margaret Cancer Centre, Toronto, ON, Canada

关键词: biophotonics;    Photodynamic therapy;    monte carlo;    treatment planning;    Dose-volume histogram;    PDT;    explicit dosimetry;    Light fluence;    Tetrahedral Mesh;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fphy.2015.00006

学科分类：物理（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is recognized as the “gold standard” for biophotonic simulation, capturing all relevant physics and material properties at the perceived cost of high computing demands. Tetrahedral-mesh-based MC simulations particularly are attractive due to the ability to refine the mesh at will to conform to complicated geometries or user-defined resolution requirements. Since no approximations of material or light-source properties are required, MC methods are applicable to the broadest set of biophotonic simulation problems. MC methods also have other implementation features including inherent parallelism, and permit a continuously-variable quality-runtime tradeoff. We demonstrate here a complete MC-based prospective fluence dose evaluation system for interstitial PDT to generate dose-volume histograms on a tetrahedral mesh geometry description. To our knowledge, this is the first such system for general interstitial photodynamic therapy employing MC methods and is therefore applicable to a very broad cross-section of anatomy and material properties. We demonstrate that evaluation of dose-volume histograms is an effective variance-reduction scheme in its own right which greatly reduces the number of packets required and hence runtime required to achieve acceptable result confidence. We conclude that MC methods are feasible for general PDT treatment evaluation and planning, and considerably less costly than widely believed.

【 授权许可】

CC BY