June 14 2010  |  News Article 

Nucletron is speeding up the performance of dose calculations for external beam treatment 

Classic algorithms to be discontinued

Nucletron is speeding up the performance of dose calculations for external beam treatment planning in Oncentra, the company’s universal treatment planning environment. Oncentra’s Advanced algorithms will take advantage of multiprocessor cores and high-performance graphics cards to cut calculation times by orders of magnitude. “We have developed a parallelized implementation of both our pencil-beam algorithm and our collapsed cone algorithm for photon planning. That means they are capable of running eight calculations simultaneously in parallel on eight-core computers, thus reducing calculation time by roughly a factor of eight,” explains Jaap Pijpelink, product manager, external beam planning.

Planners have used less accurate pencil-beam algorithms to calculate radiation dose distributions because they are faster than the more accurate collapsed-beam algorithms, which can take hours to run. “Now with the faster computers, it is becoming more attractive for customers to use the Advanced collapsed-cone algorithm,” said Pijpelink. “We are also implementing the collapsed cone calculation on a graphics card to boost performance even further. We have been able to reduce the calculation time from an hour to a couple of minutes.” And with much faster dose calculation, Pijpelink adds,  “You will have the possibility to fairly quickly explore alternative plan which could lead to an improvement of the treatment outcome.”

Redesign for multiprocessing and high-speed graphics hardware isn’t the only advance that gives the Oncentra Advanced algorithms their name. “We also made the algorithms more accurate by accounting for the exact geometry of the gantry head and the multileaf collimators. As a result, they have cut the error rate in half over the classic versions.”

Both classic and advanced algorithms have been available to users, but by yearend 2010 the classic algorithms will be discontinued. Switching from the classic to the advanced algorithms will require some QA steps. Nucletron provides a beam modeling tool to assist with the switch.

The performance of the advanced algorithms will be demonstrated at AAPM in July.

Oncentra advanced algorithms for external beam therapy
The complete picture

"Physics and dose calculation algorithms are strengths of the Oncentra system, and Nucletron with its physics staff is continuously striving to be at the forefront bringing highly accurate dose calculations into the reach of clinical use,” says Jaap Pijpelink, product manager. Oncentra is a universal planning environment, with fast and accurate advanced algorithms available now or in development for photon, electron, and proton therapies.

For photon treatment
• Advanced pencil-beam
• Advanced collapsed-beam
• Advanced Monte Carlo, on the roadmap

For electron treatment
• Advanced Monte Carlo. Fast and far more accurate than pencil-beam algorithms.

For proton treatment
• Advanced pencil-beam, soon to be released
• Advanced Monte Carlo, soon to be released