Parallelization of Fast Monte Carlo Dose Calculation for Radiotherapy Treatment Planning on the ARMv8 Architecture

Abstract

Monte Carlo (MC) simulation plays a key role in radiotherapy. Since the simulation time of the MC program cannot fully meet the clinical requirements, we use the ARM-based FT-2000+ multi-core processor for parallelization, which provides an effective solution for accelerating MC dose calculation. In this paper, we implement and verify FT-DPM, which is an OpenMP-based MC Dose Planning Method on FT-2000+. FT-DPM utilizes the parallelism of MC simulation and the advantage of ARM architecture to achieve the parallelization on ARM architecture. Meanwhile, we optimize the original DPM program in terms of memory allocation, data structure and data type. The experiments show that, compared with the original DPM code, FT-DPM obtains very accurate results and reaches the maximum speedups of 155.94 times for the electron case. The parallel program based on FT-2000+ only takes 44.1 seconds to simulate the particle transport of 100 million times, showing good clinical application potential. In addition, the speedup and efficiency of FT-DPM running on different core counts are also discussed.