Hardware Acceleration for 3-D Radiation Dose Calculation

The problem of calculating accurate dose distributions lies in the heart of modern radiation therapy for cancer treatment. Software implementations of dose calculation algorithms are highly costly in terms of CPU time. This paper proposes a multi-engine hardware design for 3D dose calculation based on the collapsed-cone algorithm. The performance of the hardware with one engine (100 Mhz) is already superior to the software counterpart executed on a 2.4 GHz PC. By exploiting the inherent parallelism of the collapsed-cone algorithm, the proposed two-level design with multiple engines can achieve almost a linear speedup compared with the one-engine design. Due to its modular approach, the design can also be easily implemented on a multi-FPGA system for an even greater speedup.