KiT-RT: An extendable framework for radiative transfer and therapy

Abstract

In this paper, we present KiT-RT (Kinetic Transport Solver for Radiation Therapy), an open-source C++ based framework for solving kinetic equations in therapy applications available at https://github.com/CSMMLab/KiT-RT. This software framework aims to provide a collection of classical deterministic solvers for unstructured meshes that allow for easy extendability. Therefore, KiT-RT is a convenient base to test new numerical methods in various applications and compare them against conventional solvers. The implementation includes spherical harmonics, minimal entropy, neural minimal entropy, and discrete ordinates methods. Solution characteristics and efficiency are presented through several test cases ranging from radiation transport to electron radiation therapy. Due to the variety of included numerical methods and easy extendability, the presented open-source code is attractive for both developers, who want a basis to build their numerical solvers, and users or application engineers, who want to gain experimental insights without directly interfering with the codebase.