Numerical calculation of energy deposition by high-energy electron beams: III-B. Improvements to the 6D phase space evolution model

The phase space evolution model of Huizenga and Storchi, Morawska-Kaczynska and Huizenga and Janssen et al has been modified to (i) allow application on currently available computer equipment with limited memory (128 Megabytes) and (ii) allow 3D dose calculations based on 3D computer tomographic patient data. This is a further development aimed at the use of the phase space evolution model in radiotherapy electron beam treatment planning. The first modification regards the application of depth evolution of the phase space state combined with an alternative method to transport back-scattered electrons. This depth evolution method requires of the order of 15 times less computer memory than the energy evolution method. Results of previous and new electron transport methods are compared and show that the new electron transport method for back-scattered electrons hardly affects the accuracy of the calculated dose distributions. The second modification regards the simulation of electron transport through tissues with varying densities by applying distributed electron transport through similarly composed media with a limited number of fixed densities. Results of non-distributed and distributed electron transport are compared and show that the distributed electron transport method hardly affects the accuracy of the calculated dose distributions. It is also shown that the results of the new dose distribution calculations are still in good agreement with and require significantly less computation time than results obtained with the EGS4 Monte Carlo method.