Geant4-based particle therapy simulation framework for verification of dose distributions in proton therapy facilities

Geant4 is a software toolkit used to simulate the interaction of particles in matter. Monte Carlo simulation is useful in the design of particle treatment facilities and quality assurance of treatment plans. The particle therapy simulation framework (PTSIM) is a Geant4-based simulation framework for particle therapy validated using protons and carbon-ions. The PTSIM provides a common platform to model three Japanese proton and ion therapy facilities, as well as three facilities in other countries, allowing users who are not Geant4 experts to accurately and efficiently run Geant4 simulations for any of these pre-built configurations. While Geant4 has been heavily and widely used in medical physics research, clinical applications remain limited as a result of problems involving of computational efficiency and usability by medical staff. The present paper describes the available functionality and the effort on further development of PTSIM in order to apply PTSIM in a straightforward manner to clinical applications. The details of these features of functionalities related to the digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) interface in order to coordinate with hospital information systems and the parallelization interface for grid systems in order to achieve better turnaround time are reported. (author)