Treatment Planning Systems for BNCT: Requirements and Peculiarities

The main requirements and peculiarities expected from the BNCT-oriented treatment planning system (TPS) are summarized in this paper. The TPS is a software, which can be integrated or composed by several auxiliary programs. It plays important roles inside the whole treatment planning of the patient's organ in BNCT. However, the main goal is the simulation of the irradiation, in order to obtain the optimal configuration, in terms of neutron spectrum, patient positioning and dose distribution in the tumour and healthy tissues. The presence of neutrons increases the level of complexity, because much more nuclear reactions need to be monitored and properly calculated during the simulation of the patient's treatment. To this purposes several 3D geometry reconstruction techniques, generally based on the CT scanning data, are implemented and Monte Carlo codes are normally used. The TPSs are expected to show also the results (basically doses and fluences) in a proper format, such as isocurves (or isosurfaces) along the CT scanning planes or graphs along a user-defined axis. The most used BNCT-dedicated TPSs have been briefly described in this paper: NCTPlan and SERA. Also the main characteristics of BDTPS are reported. This TPS has been thought with the aim of properly coupling the real 10B macroscopic distribution, obtained via PET scanning of the patient's organ, to the 3D and Monte Carlo modelling.