PyDoseRT Photon: Physics-Guided Pencil-Beam Dose Calculation with Neural Priors and Residual Correction for CT and MRI

Abstract

We present a hybrid, physics-based analytical pencil-beam (PB) dose engine, augmented by two small frozen neural physics priors, followed by a 3-D convolutional residual-correction network (U-Net). We address the DoseRAD2026 (https://doserad2026.grand-challenge.org/) photon dose-prediction task with PyDoseRT Photon, a GPU PB engine implemented in PyTorch and corrected toward Monte Carlo (MC) accuracy in three learned stages of decreasing physical specificity. The engine reproduces the challenge's head-less MC source exactly where it can and models the patient with a beam-quality-indexed pencil kernel evaluated at the field's fluence-weighted radiological depth, and TERMA source scaling at the interaction site. Two tiny neural priors are trained through the frozen engine and then frozen themselves: a 39k-parameter 2-D fluence correction and a 48-parameter lateral heterogeneity correction mixing mass-conserving Gaussian redistribution operators. A compact 3-D U-Net (1.36M parameters) with a sequential refinement branch then predicts, per control point (CP) in the beam's-eye-view (BEV) frame, a bounded multiplicative gain and additive residual from seven channels. All learned stages are zero-initialized, so training starts from the analytical solution. For MRI, an nnU-Net regression model synthesizes a CT that enters the identical pipeline, with consecutively, the same trained corrector as the CT track. Design choices were driven by the challenge ranking, in which runtime carries double weight. The submitted method evaluated on our local CT and MR validation dataset achieved CP MAE 0.0086 and 0.0098, IDD distance 0.0011 and 0.0013, plan MAE 0.0024 and 0.0047, gamma pass rate (1%/1mm) 99.12% and 96.95%, with runtimes of 46s and 49s, respectively.