Potential MCNP Enhancements for NCT

Abstract

MCNP,¹ a Los Alamos National Laboratory Monte Carlo radiation transport code, is currently widely used in the medical community for a variety of purposes including treatment planning, diagnostics, beam design, tomographic studies, and radiation protection. This is particularly true in the Neutron Capture Therapy (NCT) community as evidenced by the numerous uses of MCNP in various publications.² The current widespread medical use of MCNP after its general public distribution in about 1980 attests to the code’s general versatility and usefulness, particularly since its development to date has not been influenced by medical applications. This paper discusses enhancements to MCNP that could be implemented at Los Alamos for the benefit of the NCT community. These enhancements generally fall into two categories, namely 1) those that have already been developed to some extent but are not yet publically available, and 2) those that seem both needed based on our current understanding of NCT goals, and achievable based on our working knowledge of the MCNP code.