This book is a guide to the use of Monte Carlo techniques in radiation transport. This topic is of great interest for medical physicists. Praised as a "gold standard" for accurate radiotherapy dose calculations, Monte Carlo has stimulated a high level of research activity that has produced thousands of papers within the past few years. The book is designed primarily to address the needs of an academically inclined medical physicist who wishes to learn the technique, as well as experienced users of standard Monte Carlo codes who wish to gain insight into the underlying mathematics of Monte Carlo algorithms. The book focuses on the fundamentalsgiving full attention to and explaining the very basic concepts. It also includes advanced topics and covers recent advances such as transport of charged particles in magnetic fields and the grid-based solvers of the Boltzmann equation.

Covers the foundations of both the radiation transport theory and Monte Carlo on an introductory level Focuses on the fundamentals and explains the mathematical foundations and the underlying logic of Monte Carlo algorithms Comprehensively covers all the classical as well as recently emerging topics important for medical physics applications Presents most of the techniques as step-by-step algorithms, so that the reader will have ready-to-use recipes for a variety of problems

Autorentext
Oleg N. Vassiliev has published over 70 papers in the field medical physics, radiation transport and Monte Carlo methods, including several highly cited papers on Monte Carlo methods in radiation therapy. He has applied Monte Carlo techniques to a wide variety of problems in the field, and was one of the leading collaborators in the development of grid-based solvers of the Boltzmann equation for radiotherapy dose calculations.

Inhalt
Introduction.- Sampling techniques.- The Boltzmann equation.- Particle trajectories, tallies, variance reduction.- Transport of charged particles.- Microdosimetry. Elements of stochastic transport theory.- Grid based Boltzmann equation solvers.- Appendices.