Monte Carlo simulation is often considered the “gold standard” for radiotherapy dose calculation. The simulation of patient treatments however, is time consuming to manually set up – the beam arrangement needs to be converted into a series of linear accelerator geometries, the CT dataset needs to be converted into a format understood by the Monte Carlo software suite.
The Monte Carlo DICOM toolkit, or MCDTK, has been developed to automate this process, and provide tools for analysing deviations between conventional TPS dose calculation methods and Monte Carlo simulation results. MCDTK produces input files for the BEAMnrc / DOSXYZnrc user codes using previously commissioned accelerator models.
The software has been developed in the C# language, and utilises the FO-DICOM library for parsing DICOM information.
The software requires Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5, available on PC systems running Microsoft Windows Vista / 7 / 8. The installation files can be found here.
