ThIS is an acronym for Therapeutic Irradiation Simulator for cancer therapy, which simulates the irradiation of a patient with carbon ion beams in order to allow clinicians to compute the 3D dose distributions inside the patient for a computer-aided tomography (CT) scan.

Such simulations are very computing intensive, requiring thousands of hours on a single CPU. But by putting ThIS on the EGEE Grid, one simulation can be split into independent sub-simulations executed concurrently on different CPUs, speeding up the job.

The project is now being integrated into the OpenGATE project.

The developers — Sorina Camarasu, Tristan Glatard, Laurent Guigues, Thibault Frisson and David Sarrut, of CNRS in Lyon, France — say “The results are promising and we are confident that this advanced submission method will help the simulator to reach a larger research and medical community. Moreover, since most users need a higher-level graphical user interface, we are currently interfacing the existing ThIS-DIANE architecture with tools like Moteur and the medical virtual laboratory of the Dutch VL-e project for a research usage and with the HOPE platform for clinical use.”

Image courtesy of CREATIS-LRMN & Léon Bérard cancer center