ARCHER - An Extremely Fast Medical Radiation Dose Computing Software

DESCRIPTIONprovided by applicantThe goal of this project is to develop a commercial software package for rapid Monte Carlo based dose computation in imaging and radiation therapyThe product takes advantage of a desktop parallel computer equipped with emerging hardware originally developed gaming and high performance computingThe project is motivated by the fact that the market is ripe for a product that brings massively parallel computing power currently available only to National Labs and major research universities to busy and resource limited radiology oncology clinicsThe preliminary studies by usas well as other groupson this very new research topic have thus far revealed a number of major challengesSpecific AimsPhase I SegmentTo develop a prototype ARCHER software hardware system suitable for third party user testingTo demonstrate performance advantage of ARCHER against clinical radiation treatment planning systemPhase II SegmentTo finish the ARCHER software design for radiation therapy dose calculations using emerging parallel computing hardware platformsTo systematically benchmark radiation physics modeling using experiments and well tested Monte Carlo code packagesTo evaluate clinical benefits of ARCHER for selected radiation treatment protocols involving prostate cancer patientsTo evaluate software user experience for interactive and easy to use dose verification and treatment planning PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCEA commercial software package is developed for rapid Monte Carlo based dose computation in imaging and radiation therapy using emerging hardware originally developed for gaming and high performance computing