Improved Woodcock tracking on Monte Carlo simulations for medical applications. (9th November 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Behlouli, A; Visvikis, D; Bert, J
• Is Part Of: Physics in medicine & biology. Volume 63:Number 22(2018:Nov.)
• Publication Date: 2018-11-09
• Subjects: Monte Carlo simulation -- particle navigation -- Woodcock tracking -- variance reduction technique; Biophysics -- Periodicals; Medical physics -- Periodicals; 610.153
• DOI: 10.1088/1361-6560/aae937
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0031-9155

Abstract

Abstract: This paper presents a new variance reduction technique called super voxel Woodcock (SVW), which combines Woodcock tracking technique with the super voxel concept, used in computer graphics. It consists in grouping the voxels of the volume in a super voxel grid (pre-processing step) by associating to each of the super voxels a local value of the most attenuate medium which will later serve to the interaction distances sampling. SVW allows reducing the sampling of the particle path while a high-density material is present within the simulated phantom. In order to evaluate the performance of the SVW method compare to both standard and Woodcock tracking methods, algorithms were implemented within the same GPU MCS framework GGEMS. This method improves the performance of the standard Woodcock method by a factor of 4.5 and 4.3 for x-ray imaging application and intraoperative radiotherapy respectively. The proposed SVW method did not introduce any bias on the simulations.