DPI-MoCo: Deep Prior Image Constrained Motion Compensation Reconstruction for 4D CBCT.

Abstract

4D cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) plays a critical role in adaptive radiation therapy for lung cancer. However, extremely sparse sampling projection data will cause severe streak artifacts in 4D CBCT images. Existing deep learning (DL) methods heavily rely on large labeled training datasets which are difficult to obtain in practical scenarios. Restricted by this dilemma, DL models often struggle with simultaneously retaining dynamic motions, removing streak degradations, and recovering fine details. To address the above challenging problem, we introduce a Deep Prior Image Constrained Motion Compensation framework (DPI-MoCo) that decouples the 4D CBCT reconstruction into two sub-tasks including coarse image restoration and structural detail fine-tuning. In the first stage, the proposed DPI-MoCo combines the prior image guidance, generative adversarial network, and contrastive learning to globally suppress the artifacts while maintaining the respiratory movements. After that, to further enhance the local anatomical structures, the motion estimation and compensation technique is adopted. Notably, our framework is performed without the need for paired datasets, ensuring practicality in clinical cases. In the Monte Carlo simulation dataset, the DPI-MoCo achieves competitive quantitative performance compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods. Furthermore, we test DPI-MoCo in clinical lung cancer datasets, and experiments validate that DPI-MoCo not only restores small anatomical structures and lesions but also preserves motion information.