Speaker
Description
TOPAS wraps and extends the Geant4 Simulation Toolkit to create a tool that is at once highly flexible and easy to use. Originally created for medical physics under 12 years of funding from the National Cancer Institute, TOPAS is now available to all users completely free of charge under the most permissive style open-source license. While TOPAS has the full Geant4 at its core, it wraps Geant4 in its own unique architecture that allows users to master the tool in days and continue to apply it, from one project to another, over years of evolving research activity. TOPAS currently has over 2600 users at 646 institutions in 68 countries, each user running TOPAS in their own way for their own project. TOPAS is fully multi-threaded, requires no programming experience, and is available as a pre-built executable for all common macOS and Linux systems. While most users apply TOPAS to radiation therapy, medical imaging and radiobiology, it has also been applied in areas as diverse as archeology and materials science. We will take a look at unique aspects of the TOPAS architecture, including its entirely innovative control system, geometry model, scoring system, and its "time feature" system that makes TOPAS not just 3D, but 4D, wherein almost any parameter can vary over time. We will show examples of how TOPAS has been applied in medicine and discuss how it can also easily apply to aerospace simulations. TOPAS is further described at https://www.topasmc.org/
