Medical applications of the PHITS code, 3; User assistance program for medical physics computation

Furuta, Takuya   ; Hashimoto, Shintaro  ; Sato, Tatsuhiko   

An application of Particle and Heavy Ion Transport Code System; PHITS, for medical physics is to simulate treatment planning of radiation therapy. Treatment planning simulation is conducted by constructing patient geometry from patient CT data, calculating radiation transport of external beam, and deducing dose distribution inside patient body. However, it is not easy to extract information such as patient location and CT value distribution from patient CT data or to construct complex accelerator geometry in PHITS format. Therefore, we developed two user assistance programs, DICOM2PHITS and PSFC4PHITS. DICOM2PHITS is a program to construct the voxel PHITS simulation geometry from patient CT DICOM image data. PSFC4PHITS is a program to convert the IAEA phase-space file data to PHITS format to be used as simulation source of PHITS. We explain these two programs by showing some applications in this article.