Ricerc@Sapienza

Advanced radiotherapy techniques use complex beam delivery systems like focused multipole beams, in order to obtain high tumor control probability with reduced normal tissue complication rate. 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. 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.
The Intra Operative Radiation Therapy (IORT) may represent one of the first clinical modalities of a Flash clinical treatment. Within IORT, whenever needed and possible, temporarily beam modifiers (such as the protection disc for breast carcinoma treatment) are used to protect the underlying healthy tissues during the irradiation. This project is focused on the development of the electromagnetic FRED code in order to extend the use of this MC-on-GPU based as a tool for dose calculation and treatment optimization for IORT and Flash Therapy treatments.