Radiotherapy treatment planning with Monte Carlo on a distributed system

Monte Carlo methods have been used extensively in the verification of dose calculation since offer a better accuracy respect to analytical algorithms. The most severe obstacle in application to clinical practice is the high time needed for calculations. We have studied a high performance network of personal computer as a realistic alternative to a high-costs dedicated parallel hardware to be used in clinical practice as instruments of evaluation of challenging IMRT and 3D-CRT treatment plans. The run of the complete simulation showed that the time needed for calculation decreased linearly increasing the number of distributed processors. The good scalability trend allows both statistically significant accuracy and good time performances. The scalability of the Beowulf Cluster system offers a new instrument for dose calculation that could be used in clinical practice.