COMET-PE: an incident fluence response expansion transport method for radiotherapy calculations

Accurate dose calculation is a central component of radiotherapy treatment planning. A new method of dose calculation has been developed based on transport theory and validated by comparison to Monte Carlo methods. The coarse mesh transport method has been extended to allow coupled photon–electron transport in 3D. The method combines stochastic pre-computation with a deterministic solver to achieve high accuracy and precision. To enhance the method for radiotherapy calculations, a new angular basis was derived, and an analytical source treatment was developed. Validation was performed by comparison to DOSXYZnrc using a heterogeneous interface phantom composed of water, aluminum, and lung. Calculations of both kinetic energy released per unit mass and dose were compared. Good agreement was found with a maximum error and root mean square relative error of less than 1.5% for all cases. The results show that the new method achieves an accuracy comparable to Monte Carlo. (paper)