Recent improvements of the Particle and Heavy Ion Transport code System; PHITS version 3.33

Sato, Tatsuhiko; Iwamoto, Yosuke; Hashimoto, Shintaro; Ogawa, Tatsuhiko; Furuta, Takuya; Abe, Shinichiro; Kai, Takeshi; Matsuya, Yusuke; Matsuda, Norihiro; Hirata, Yuho; et al.

Journal of Nuclear Science and Technology, 9 Pages, 2023/00

https://doi.org/10.1080/00223131.2023.2275736

The Particle and Heavy Ion Transport code System (PHITS) is a general-purpose Monte Carlo radiation transport code that can simulate the behavior of most particle species with energies up to 1 TeV (per nucleon for ions). Its new version, PHITS3.31, was recently developed and released to the public. In the new version, the compatibility with high-energy nuclear data libraries and the algorithm of the track-structure modes have been improved. In this paper, we summarize the upgraded features of PHITS3.31 with respect to the physics models, utility functions, and application software introduced since the release of PHITS3.02 in 2017.

Development of the DICOM-based Monte Carlo dose reconstruction system for a retrospective study on the secondary cancer risk in carbon ion radiotherapy

Furuta, Takuya; Koba, Yusuke*; Hashimoto, Shintaro; Chang, W.*; Yonai, Shunsuke*; Matsumoto, Shinnosuke*; Ishikawa, Akihisa*; Sato, Tatsuhiko

Physics in Medicine & Biology, 67(14), p.145002_1 - 145002_15, 2022/07

https://doi.org/10.1088/1361-6560/ac7998

Carbon ion radiotherapy has an advantage over conventional radiotherapy such that its superior dose concentration on the tumor helps to reduce unwanted dose to surrounding normal tissues. Nevertheless, a little dose to normal tissues, which is a potential risk of secondary cancer, is still unavoidable. The Monte Carlo simulation is a good candidate for the tool to assess secondary cancer risk, including the contributions of secondary particles produced by nuclear reactions. We therefore developed a new dose reconstruction system implementing PHITS as the engine. In this system, the PHITS input is automatically created from the DICOM data sets recorded in the treatment planning. The developed system was validated by comparing to experimental dose distribution in water and treatment plan on an anthropomorphic phantom. This system will be used for retrospective studies using the patient data in National Institute for Quantum and Science and Technology.

Technical Note: Validation of a material assignment method for a retrospective study of carbon-ion radiotherapy using Monte Carlo simulation

Chang, W.*; Koba, Yusuke*; Furuta, Takuya; Yonai, Shunsuke*; Hashimoto, Shintaro; Matsumoto, Shinnosuke*; Sato, Tatsuhiko

Journal of Radiation Research (Internet), 62(5), p.846 - 855, 2021/09

https://doi.org/10.1093/jrr/rrab028

With the aim of developing a revaluation tool of treatment plan in carbon-ion radiotherapy using Monte Carlo (MC) simulation, we propose two methods; one is dedicated to identify realistic-tissue materials from a CT image with satisfying the well-calibrated relationship between CT numbers and stopping power ratio (SPR) provided by TPS, and the other is to estimate dose to water considering the particle- and energy-dependent SPR between realistic tissue materials and water. We validated these proposed methods by computing depth dose distribution in homogeneous and heterogeneous phantoms composed of human tissue materials and water irradiated by a 400 MeV/u carbon beam with 8 cm SOBP using a MC simulation code PHITS and comparing with results of conventional treatment planning system (TPS). Our result suggested that use of water as a surrogate of real tissue materials, which is adopted in conventional TPS, is inadequate for dose estimation from secondary particles because their production rates cannot be scaled by SPR of the primary particle in water. We therefore concluded that the proposed methods can play important roles in the reevaluation of the treatment plans in carbon-ion radiotherapy.

scattering length from photoproduction on the proton near the reaction threshold

Ishikawa, Takatsugu*; Fujimura, Hisako*; Fukasawa, Hiroshi*; Hashimoto, Ryo*; He, Q.*; Honda, Yuki*; Hosaka, Atsushi; Iwata, Takahiro*; Kaida, Shun*; Kasagi, Jirota*; et al.

Physical Review C, 101(5), p.052201_1 - 052201_6, 2020/05

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevC.101.052201

Time-resolved imaging of magnetoelastic waves by the cotton-mouton effect

Hioki, Tomosato*; Hashimoto, Yusuke*; Johansen, T. H.*; Saito, Eiji

Physical Review Applied (Internet), 11(6), p.061007_1 - 061007_5, 2019/06

https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevApplied.11.061007

Development of a Monte Carlo dosimetry system for retrospective study of heavay-ion therapy

Furuta, Takuya; Koba, Yusuke*; Chang, W.*; Hashimoto, Shintaro; Yonai, Shunsuke*; Matsumoto, Shinnosuke*; Sato, Tatsuhiko

no journal, , 

Heavy-ion (carbon-ion) therapy has advantages over conventional radiotherapy such as superior dose concentration and better relative biological effectiveness while the secondary particles produced by nuclear reactions between incident carbon ions and matters induce complexity for risk assessment of secondary cancer. For this assessment, precise transport calculation of secondary particles are required so the Monte Carlo transport calculation is desired. We therefore construct a dosimetry system including PHITS as the engine. In this system, the PHITS input is automatically created from the DICOM data sets recorded in the treatment planning. The transport calculation is simulated by PHITS and dose distribution around the tumor but also out-of-filed is computed. This system will be used as retrospective study in National Institute of Radiological Sciences.

Particle and Heavy Ion Transport code System: PHITS

Sato, Tatsuhiko; Iwamoto, Yosuke; Hashimoto, Shintaro; Ogawa, Tatsuhiko; Furuta, Takuya; Abe, Shinichiro; Kai, Takeshi; Tsai, P.-E.; Matsuda, Norihiro; Matsuya, Yusuke; et al.

no journal, , 

WPHITS is a general purpose Monte Carlo particle transport simulation code of which development is led by the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA). It can deal with the transport of all types of particle species over wide energy ranges, using several nuclear reaction models and nuclear data libraries. PHITS has been used for various research fields such as accelerator design, radiotherapy, radiation protection, particle and cosmic-ray physics, and environmental sciences. PHITS can be installed and executed on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and both MPI and OpenMP parallel versions are available. The details of the features of PHITS will be presented at the meeting.

Recent updates and shielding benchmark of PHITS

Ogawa, Tatsuhiko; Iwamoto, Yosuke; Hashimoto, Shintaro; Sato, Tatsuhiko; Matsuda, Norihiro; Kunieda, Satoshi; elik, Y.*; Furutachi, Naoya*; Niita, Koji*; Furuta, Takuya; et al.

no journal, , 

PHITS is a general-purpose radiation transport simulation code that has been developed mainly by JAEA in cooperation with domestic and foreign research institutes. We released the latest version, PHITS 3.27, in March 2022. Since SATIF-14 held in 3 years ago, following updates were implemented (1)Extension of the cross section data reading module, (2)Modernization of burn-up calculation code DCHAIN, (3)Functionality to calculate the dependence of the result on the input parameters, (4)Interactive 3D geometry viewer,PHIG-3D, (5)Cosmic ray source function, (6)Track-structure calculation models, which calculate the atomic-scale reactions of charged particles on event-by-event basis, for electrons, positions, and heavy ions, (7)GUI-version RT-PHITS development, (8)random number generation by Xor-shift64 algorithm, (9)User-defined stopping power reading module, (10)EXFOR data reading module, (11)Photon-induced mu-mu pair production model. In addition, a bench, ark study conducted by Iwamoto et al, is also presented to explain the importance of the new cross section reading module.

Comparison of physical dose and dose-averaged linear energy transfer between treatment planning system and Monte Carlo simulation in carbon-ion radiotherapy

Ishikawa, Akihisa*; Koba, Yusuke*; Furuta, Takuya; Chang, W.*; Hashimoto, Shintaro; Yonai, Shunsuke*; Matsumoto, Shinnosuke*; Sato, Tatsuhiko

no journal, , 

There found to be a relationship between the dose-averaged linear energy transfer LETd and local tumor control in carbon-ion radiotherapy (CIRT). However, only physical dose and biological dose are registered in the past treatment records of CIRT in QST hospital and LETd can not be deduced directly. There is a method to estimate LETd based on RBE-LETd-fitted function but some problems such as non-singularity at the end point of carbon ions are known. On the other hand, we propose a method to reproduce the CIRT by reconstructing the beam transport geometry based on the treatment planning data and conduct Monte Carlo simulation. The LETd can be also computed directly. We therefore compared LETd obtained by Monte Carlo simulation with estimated LETd using the treatment planning data. We found that underestimation around the end point of carbon ions but the influence was local and thus the LETd estimates are valid for the purpose computing in organ scale.