A Method to Overcome the Limitations of KVCT and MVCT in Treatment Planning for Patients with Bilateral Hip Prostheses

Abstract

Treatment planning for patients with bilateral hip replacements is challenging, especially if beams must penetrate the prosthesis to treat the surrounding tissues. The high density prosthesis causes severe artifacts in conventional KVCT, which makes it extremely difficult to identify the target and normal structures and also introduces significant errors in heterogeneity-corrected dose calculation. Though tomotherapy MVCT does not suffer strong artifacts from the prosthesis, it is limited by the 40 cm field of view, which is too small to image the whole pelvis for most patients, and poorer image contrast.