Dose calculation for radiotherapy treatment planning using Monte Carlo methods on FPGA based hardware

This work describes a fast Monte Carlo Machine for dose calculation in radiotherapy treatment planning on FPGA based hardware. When performing Monte Carlo simulations of the radiation dose delivered to the human body, the Compton interaction is simulated. The inputs to the system are the energy and the normalized direction vectors of the incoming photon. The energy and the direction vectors of the scattered photon and the scattered electron are calculated. The energy distribution by the scattered electron along its path in a voxel space is then calculated which can be used to construct maps of dose distribution in real time.