English

PenRed: An extensible and parallel Monte-Carlo framework for radiation transport based on PENELOPE

Computational Physics 2021-06-21 v2 Atomic Physics Instrumentation and Detectors Medical Physics

Abstract

Monte Carlo methods provide detailed and accurate results for radiation transport simulations. Unfortunately, the high computational cost of these methods limits its usage in real-time applications. Moreover, existing computer codes do not provide a methodology for adapting these kind of simulations to specific problems without advanced knowledge of the corresponding code system, and this restricts their applicability. To help solve these current limitations, we present PenRed, a general-purpose, stand-alone, extensible and modular framework code based on PENELOPE for parallel Monte Carlo simulations of electron-photon transport through matter. It has been implemented in C++ programming language and takes advantage of modern object-oriented technologies. In addition, PenRed offers the capability to read and process DICOM images as well as to construct and simulate image-based voxelized geometries, so as to facilitate its usage in medical applications. Our framework has been successfully verified against the original PENELOPE Fortran code. Furthermore, the implemented parallelism has been tested showing a significant improvement in the simulation time without any loss in precision of results.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2003.00796,
  title  = {PenRed: An extensible and parallel Monte-Carlo framework for radiation transport based on PENELOPE},
  author = {V. Giménez-Alventosa and V. Giménez Gómez and S. Oliver Gil},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.00796},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

28 pages, 13 figures. The update includes the comments and suggestions of the referees

R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:00:04.835Z