Semantic Web-Based PMCEPT Monte Carlo Code Simulations in Medical Physics

초록

PMCEPT is a three-dimensional parallel Monte Carlo electron and photon transport code based on the standard message passing interface. It has been intensively validated for use in diverse medical physics applications such as radiotherapy, dosimetry, nuclear medicine, X-ray diagnostics, and radiation protection calculations. Despite extensive validation, the Monte Carlo code may not be an easy tool to pick up for a user working in medical areas because it requires some advanced knowledge of information technologies. To overcome this difficulty, we developed a function web based on recent semantic web technology. Recent developments of the semantic web make it possible to understand and satisfy various requests of people and machines to intelligently use web contents or even control other machines. This paper describes a specific functional web (including shell scripts) to run the PMCEPT code through a network and verifies the overall dosimetric accuracy of PMCEPT physics algorithms with a 6-MV beam model of the Siemens Primus linear accelerator. A medical professional with relatively little information technology experience can take advantage of the Monte Carlo simulation via the functional web running on our dedicated server with his or her PC (client). We compare calculations with measurements in water and poly methyl methacrylate (PMMA) phantoms for 6-MV Siemens Primus photon beams. The target geometry of a PMMA head and neck phantom was derived from the CT data (DICOM format). Maximum discrepancies were lesser than 2% in the tail parts of the lateral dose distributions. This study also suggests that our functional web may have a wide range of scientific applications because it is able to control any computer code running on physically separate machines via the Internet.

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