Patent ID: 7519150

Claim:
A system for determining dose in heterogeneous media of varying electron density from a therapeutic high-energy radiation-beam for radiation treatment, comprising: a communication network; an image gathering device accessible to the communication network to provide an at least two-dimensional image slice of a target volume and an adjacent structure volume in a patient defining a patient volume; a radiation beam source to deliver radiation to the target volume according to a radiation treatment plan along a plurality of pencil beams; a radiation treatment planning computer in communication with the image gathering device and having memory and a processor coupled to the memory; and radiation treatment planning program product stored in the memory of the radiation treatment planning computer and adapted for enhanced optimization of a radiation treatment plan for delivering radiation to the target volume, the radiation treatment planning program product including instructions that when executed by the processor of the radiation treatment planning computer causes the computer to perform the operations of: receiving a set of photon beam data for a water medium to thereby parameterize a dose model for unit relative electron density, parameterizing a machine-dependent dose model for unit relative electron density responsive to the set of photon beam data, determining a machine-dependent primary dose profile for each of a first set of a plurality of electron densities distributed through a preselected range of electron densities responsive to the dose model for unit relative electron density, determining a machine-dependent scatter dose profile for each of a second set of a plurality of electron densities distributed through a preselected range of electron densities responsive to the dose model for unit relative electron density, determining patient specific primary dose profile parameters for each of the plurality of pencil beams to be utilized during radiation treatment responsive to the primary dose profiles, determining patient specific scatter dose profile parameters for each of the plurality of pencil beam to be utilized during radiation treatment, retrieving the patient specific primary and scatter dose profile parameters separately for each of a plurality of points of interest in a patient volume to compute dose with constant time computational complexity for each pencil-beam to each point of interest as selected a posteriori to profile parameter determination responsive to one of the following: a value of electron density associated with the respective point of interest and an electron density distribution associated with the respective point of interest, defining a local electron density value for the respective point of interest, to thereby determine total dose at each of the plurality of points of interest, and producing a map of radiation dose delivered to the patient volume to allow a user to iteratively evaluate the total dose of the patient volume.