Fast robust dose calculation on GPU for high-precision 1H, 4He, 12C and 16O ion therapy: the FRoG platform

Radiotherapy with protons and heavier ions landmarks a novel era in the field of high-precision cancer therapy. To identify patients most benefiting from this technologically demanding therapy, fast assessment of comparative treatment plans utilizing different ion species is urgently needed. Moreover, to overcome uncertainties of actual in-vivo physical dose distribution and biological effects elicited by different radiation qualities, development of a reliable high-throughput algorithm is required. To this end, we engineered a unique graphics processing unit (GPU) based software architecture allowing rapid and robust dose calculation. FRoG, Fast Recalculation on GPU, currently operates with four particle beams available at Heidelberg Ion Beam Therapy center, i.e., raster-scanning proton (1H), helium (4He), carbon (12C) and oxygen ions (16O). FRoG enables comparative analysis of different models for estimation of physical and biological effective dose in 3D within minutes and in excellent agreement with the gold standard Monte Carlo (MC) simulation. This is a crucial step towards development of next-generation patient specific radiotherapy.