Denoising of electron beam Monte Carlo dose distributions using digital filtering techniques

The Monte Carlo (MC) method has long been viewed as the ultimate dose distribution computational technique. The inherent stochastic dose fluctuations (i.e. noise), however, have several important disadvantages: noise will affect estimates of all the relevant dosimetric and radiobiological indices, and noise will degrade the resulting dose contour visualizations. We suggest the use of a post-processing denoising step to reduce statistical fluctuations and also improve dose contour visualization. We report the results of applying four different two-dimensional digital smoothing filters to two-dimensional dose images. The Integrated Tiger Series MC code was used to generate 10 MeV electron beam dose distributions at various depths in two different phantoms. The observed qualitative effects of filtering include: (a) the suppression of voxel-to-voxel (high-frequency) noise and (b) the resulting contour plots are visually more comprehensible. Drawbacks include, in some cases, slight blurring of penumbra near the surface and slight blurring of other very sharp real dosimetric features. Of the four digital filters considered here, one, a filter based on a local least-squares principle, appears to suppress noise with negligible degradation of real dosimetric features. We conclude that denoising of electron beam MC dose distributions is feasible and will yield improved dosimetric reliability and improved visualization of dose distributions. (author)