Furuta Takuya, Sato Tatsuhiko, Han Min Cheol, Yeom Yeon Soo, Kim Chan Hyeong, Brown Justin L, Bolch Wesley E
Nuclear Science and Engineering Center, Japan Atomic Energy Agency, 2-4 Shirakata, Tokai-mura, Ibaraki 319-1195, Japan. J. Crayton Pruitt Family Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States of America.
Phys Med Biol. 2017 Jun 21;62(12):4798-4810. doi: 10.1088/1361-6560/aa6b45. Epub 2017 Apr 4.
A new function to treat tetrahedral-mesh geometry was implemented in the particle and heavy ion transport code systems. To accelerate the computational speed in the transport process, an original algorithm was introduced to initially prepare decomposition maps for the container box of the tetrahedral-mesh geometry. The computational performance was tested by conducting radiation transport simulations of 100 MeV protons and 1 MeV photons in a water phantom represented by tetrahedral mesh. The simulation was repeated with varying number of meshes and the required computational times were then compared with those of the conventional voxel representation. Our results show that the computational costs for each boundary crossing of the region mesh are essentially equivalent for both representations. This study suggests that the tetrahedral-mesh representation offers not only a flexible description of the transport geometry but also improvement of computational efficiency for the radiation transport. Due to the adaptability of tetrahedrons in both size and shape, dosimetrically equivalent objects can be represented by tetrahedrons with a much fewer number of meshes as compared its voxelized representation. Our study additionally included dosimetric calculations using a computational human phantom. A significant acceleration of the computational speed, about 4 times, was confirmed by the adoption of a tetrahedral mesh over the traditional voxel mesh geometry.
在粒子与重离子输运代码系统中实现了一种用于处理四面体网格几何结构的新功能。为了加快输运过程中的计算速度，引入了一种原始算法，用于初步准备四面体网格几何结构容器盒的分解图。通过在由四面体网格表示的水模体中对100 MeV质子和1 MeV光子进行辐射输运模拟来测试计算性能。随着网格数量的变化重复进行模拟，然后将所需的计算时间与传统体素表示的计算时间进行比较。我们的结果表明，两种表示方式下区域网格每次边界穿越的计算成本基本相当。这项研究表明，四面体网格表示不仅能灵活描述输运几何结构，还能提高辐射输运的计算效率。由于四面体在尺寸和形状上的适应性，与体素化表示相比，剂量学等效物体可以用数量少得多的四面体网格来表示。我们的研究还包括使用计算人体模型进行剂量学计算。通过采用四面体网格而非传统的体素网格几何结构，证实计算速度显著加快，约为4倍。
