Ricerc@Sapienza

The high precision of hadrons dose release in particle therapy is an improvement in treatment efficiency with respect to standard radiotherapy only if matched by precise patient positioning and accurate treatment planning. The Treatment Planning System (TPS) is the complex software that controls the accelerator parameters used during the treatment: intensity, energies, transverse positions, etc, needed to obtain the optimal dose deliver to the patient. Usually, the commercial TPS provided by the accelerator vendors are analytical code and are outperformed by Monte Carlo based TPS especially for those cases with very heterogeneous tissue. MC proton TPS is often performed using well-established packages such as GEANT 4, FLUKA, and MCNP X but the accuracy is achieved at the cost of large CPU time. Due to this limit, this method is applied only for recalculating analytic treatment plans only for specific patients. The advent of general programming Graphics Processing Units (GPU) has prompted the development of MC codes that can dramatically reduce the plan recalculation time with respect to full MC codes in Central Processing Unit (CPU) hardware. The impressive speed gain compared to CPU-based calculations is due to both algorithmic simplification and hardware acceleration. FRED code has been developed in this framework. It is a MC-based code that runs on GPU developed to recalculate and optimize ion beam treatment planning within minutes, opening the way to many clinical applications where the calculation time is important. As far as proton beams are concerned FRED is already used as a quality assurance tool and as research. Carbon ion beams have been introduced inside FRED to allow fast optimization of a treatment plan also in carbon ion therapy. Those implementations are under development and thanks to this work it will be possible to implement the complete interaction model of carbon ion with matter in FRED and published the results in an international paper.