WE‐AB‐204‐11: Development of a Nuclear Medicine Dosimetry Module for the GPU‐Based Monte Carlo Code ARCHER

• Published in: Medical physics (Lancaster) 2015-06, Vol.42 (6Part37), p.3661-3661
• Main Authors: Liu, T, Lin, H, Xu, X, Stabin, M
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 60 APPLIED LIFE SCIENCES; BIOMEDICAL RADIOGRAPHY; DOSIMETRY; Electronic transport; IODINE 131; Monte Carlo algorithms; MONTE CARLO METHOD; NUCLEAR DECAY; Nuclear medicine imaging; OPTIMIZATION; RADIATION DOSES; RADIATION PROTECTION AND DOSIMETRY; Radioactive decay; SELF-ABSORPTION
• ISSN: 0094-2405; 2473-4209
• DOI: 10.1118/1.4925887

Purpose: To develop a nuclear medicine dosimetry module for the GPU‐based Monte Carlo code ARCHER. Methods: We have developed a nuclear medicine dosimetry module for the fast Monte Carlo code ARCHER. The coupled electron‐photon Monte Carlo transport kernel included in ARCHER is built upon the Dose Planning Method code (DPM). The developed module manages the radioactive decay simulation by consecutively tracking several types of radiation on a per disintegration basis using the statistical sampling method. Optimization techniques such as persistent threads and prefetching are studied and implemented. The developed module is verified against the VIDA code, which is based on Geant4 toolkit and has previously been verified against OLINDA/EXM. A voxelized geometry is used in the preliminary test: a sphere made of ICRP soft tissue is surrounded by a box filled with water. Uniform activity distribution of I‐131 is assumed in the sphere. Results: The self‐absorption dose factors (mGy/MBqs) of the sphere with varying diameters are calculated by ARCHER and VIDA respectively. ARCHER's result is in agreement with VIDA's that are obtained from a previous publication. VIDA takes hours of CPU time to finish the computation, while it takes ARCHER 4.31 seconds for the 12.4‐cm uniform activity sphere case. For a fairer CPU‐GPU comparison, more effort will be made to eliminate the algorithmic differences. Conclusion: The coupled electron‐photon Monte Carlo code ARCHER has been extended to radioactive decay simulation for nuclear medicine dosimetry. The developed code exhibits good performance in our preliminary test. The GPU‐based Monte Carlo code is developed with grant support from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering through an R01 grant (R01EB015478).