Department of Radiation Oncology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Department of Radiation Oncology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Phys Med. 2020 Apr;72:114-121. doi: 10.1016/j.ejmp.2020.03.019. Epub 2020 Apr 3.
This paper covers recent developments and applications of the TOPAS TOol for PArticle Simulation and presents the approaches used to disseminate TOPAS.
Fundamental understanding of radiotherapy and imaging is greatly facilitated through accurate and detailed simulation of the passage of ionizing radiation through apparatus and into a patient using Monte Carlo (MC). TOPAS brings Geant4, a reliable, experimentally validated MC tool mainly developed for high energy physics, within easy reach of medical physicists, radiobiologists and clinicians. Requiring no programming knowledge, TOPAS provides all of the flexibility of Geant4.
After 5 years of development followed by its initial release, TOPAS was subsequently expanded from its focus on proton therapy physics to incorporate radiobiology modeling. Next, in 2018, the developers expanded their user support and code maintenance as well as the scope of TOPAS towards supporting X-ray and electron therapy and medical imaging. Improvements have been achieved in user enhancement through software engineering and a graphical user interface, calculational efficiency, validation through experimental benchmarks and QA measurements, and either newly available or recently published applications. A large and rapidly increasing user base demonstrates success in our approach to dissemination of this uniquely accessible and flexible MC research tool.
The TOPAS developers continue to make strides in addressing the needs of the medical community in applications of ionizing radiation to medicine, creating the only fully integrated platform for four-dimensional simulation of all forms of radiotherapy and imaging with ionizing radiation, with a design that promotes inter-institutional collaboration.
本文涵盖了 TOPAS 文章模拟工具的最新发展和应用，并介绍了传播 TOPAS 的方法。
通过使用蒙特卡罗（MC）准确且详细地模拟电离辐射通过仪器并进入患者的过程，极大地促进了对放射治疗和成像的基本理解。TOPAS 将 Geant4 引入医学物理学家、放射生物学家和临床医生的视野，Geant4 是一种可靠的、经过实验验证的主要用于高能物理学的 MC 工具。TOPAS 无需编程知识，即可提供 Geant4 的所有灵活性。
经过 5 年的开发和初始发布后，TOPAS 从专注于质子治疗物理扩展到纳入放射生物学建模。接下来，在 2018 年，开发人员扩展了他们的用户支持和代码维护以及 TOPAS 的范围，以支持 X 射线和电子治疗和医学成像。通过软件工程和图形用户界面、计算效率、通过实验基准和 QA 测量进行验证以及新的或最近发布的应用程序，在用户增强方面取得了进展。庞大且快速增长的用户群证明了我们传播这种独特的可访问和灵活的 MC 研究工具的方法是成功的。
TOPAS 的开发人员继续努力满足医疗社区在将电离辐射应用于医学方面的需求，创建了唯一一个完全集成的平台，可用于对所有形式的放射治疗和成像进行四维模拟，其设计促进了机构间的合作。
