Design And Implementation Of Radiotherapy Dosimetric Verification Software, Based On Monte-carlo Technique

With the development of radiation therapy, radiation therapy has entered the era of precision radiotherapy. Modern radiotherapy techniques such as IMRT technology put forward higher requirements to the radiotherapy dose verification because of technical complexity and the large dose gradient. At present, more commonly used clinical dose verification methods are mainly verified through the measurement of the specific points, or specific surface by dosimeter, or two-dimensional dosimeter matrix. Since the verification objects often are phantoms rather than the patients themselves, verification results are not intuitive and dose evaluation methods are limited.This study implement the software about patient dose distribution verification by using the Monte Carlo method and the patients CT anatomical image. This paper discusses the system’s basic components, functions and the key technologies and summarizes the project management experiences in software development process. First of all, it introduces the user interface drawing technology by QT, the medical image display and processing technology by VTK, and the DICOM files(exported from TPS) and CT files parsing technology by DCMTK. They are all open source and for commercial use friendly as third party development library. The paper also introduces DICOM standard, DICOM RT extensions widely used in radiotherapy and analysis of the DICOM file format. Then the paper illustrates the functions and designs of the software system. This software first generates parameter files for Monte Carlo algorithm by parsing patient’s data combined with the mechanical parameter and dosimetry information of medical accelerator, and then generates the patient’s three-dimensional dose distribution by invoking Monte Carlo algorithm, finally compares the calculated dose distribution and the planned dose distribution. The dose distribution comparison methods include the display of patient’s 3D dose distribution, isodose curve comparison, DVH curves comparison and the Gamma analysis. Then the paper describes the key technologies used in the system, including anonymous pipe technology which implements the real-time interaction between user interface parent process and algorithm child process, pseudo colored display of dose distribution on patient’s CT slice, generation and display of isodose curve, DVH calculation algorithm and Gamma algorithm analysis. Finally, the paper summarizes the experiences of project management in software development process. It mainly describes the application of agile development methods and accumulates the experiences for agile software development method.