DoseRAD2026 Challenge dataset: AI accelerated photon and proton dose calculation for radiotherapy

Purpose: Accurate dose calculation is essential in radiotherapy for precise tumor irradiation while sparing healthy tissue. With the growing adoption of MRI-guided and real-time adaptive radiotherapy, fast and accurate dose calculation on CT and MRI is increasingly needed. The DoseRAD2026 dataset and challenge provide a public benchmark of paired CT and MRI data with beam-level photon and proton Monte Carlo dose distributions for developing and evaluating advanced dose calculation methods. Acquisition and validation methods: The dataset comprises paired CT and MRI from 115 patients (75 training, 40 testing) treated on an MRI-linac for thoracic or abdominal lesions, derived from the SynthRAD2025 dataset. Pre-processing included deformable image registration, air-cavity correction, and resampling. Ground-truth photon (6 MV) and proton dose distributions were computed using open-source Monte Carlo algorithms, yielding 40,500 photon beams and 81,000 proton beamlets. Data format and usage notes: Data are organized into photon and proton subsets with paired CT-MRI images, beam-level dose distributions, and JSON beam configuration files. Files are provided in compressed MetaImage (.mha) format. The dataset is released under CC BY-NC 4.0, with training data available from April 2026 and the test set withheld until March 2030. Potential applications: The dataset supports benchmarking of fast dose calculation methods, including beam-level dose estimation for photon and proton therapy, MRI-based dose calculation in MRI-guided workflows, and real-time adaptive radiotherapy.