Example PhD

Novel Architectures for Radiotherapy Treatment Planning

Supervisor: Professor D.W. Walker

Keywords: Multicore architectures, general-purpose GPUs, Monte-Carlo simulations, radiotherapy treatment planning.

The aim of radiotherapy treatment planning is to determine how to deliver a prescribed dosage of X-rays to the tumour while reducing harmful effects on surrounding healthy tissues and organs. This is done using software that strikes a balance between the calculation time and the accuracy of the dosage produced by the calculation. Due to its high accuracy, radiotherapy treatment planning using Monte Carlo (MC) simulations is preferred to traditional approaches. However, MC approaches are computation intensive, and on a traditional desktop computer typically take days to calculate the dosage for a single patient. Their full clinical utilisation is therefore hampered by the long calculation times, in addition to the significant computational resources that are required to make this approach practical for routine treatment planning. Of particular interest is the radiotherapy treatment of anatomically inhomogeneous areas of the body such as the lungs, head, and neck, for which the current planning systems are not sufficiently accurate, and where the use of MC techniques is likely to have a significant impact on the determination of more accurate dosage. Furthermore, this will also increase our understanding of dose-response relationships. This project will conduct research into the use of general-purpose GPUs for MC radiotherapy simulations, and to compare this approach with the use of Intel’s Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture. Both the GPGPU and MIC approaches have the potential to transform MC-based radiotherapy treatment planning by providing enough desktop computing power to run such simulations on clinically-relevant timescales. This would allow the development of a pre-packaged software environment for radiotherapy treatment planning that could be used by any medical physicist on a moderately-priced GPGPU or MIC desktop platform. This project will create highly parallel versions of existing Monte-Carlo radiotherapy simulations, such as BEAMnrc and GEANT. The MIC codes will be portable to future HPC systems that adhere to the Intel MIC architecture, although the main aim of the project will be to look at GPGPU and multicore accelerators in desktop systems.

Key Skills/Background: Open to Computer Science and Medical Physics graduates and postgraduates with good programming skills.

Contact: Professor D.W. Walker to discuss this research topic.