Abstract
Purpose:Ultrasound presents a fast, volumetric image modality for real‐time tracking of abdominal organ motion. How‐ever, ultrasound transducer placement during radiation therapy is challenging. Recently, approaches using robotic arms for intra‐treatment ultrasound imaging have been proposed. Good and reliable imaging requires placing the transducer close to the PTV. We studied the effect of a seven degrees of freedom robot on the fea‐sible beam directions.Methods:For five CyberKnife prostate treatment plans we established viewports for the transducer, i.e., points on the patient surface with a soft tissue view towards the PTV. Choosing a feasible transducer pose and using the kinematic redundancy of the KUKA LBR iiwa robot, we considered three robot poses. Poses 1 to 3 had the elbow point anterior, superior, and inferior, respectively. For each pose and each beam starting point, the pro‐jections of robot and PTV were computed. We added a 20 mm margin accounting for organ / beam motion. The number of nodes for which the PTV was partially of fully blocked were established. Moreover, the cumula‐tive overlap for each of the poses and the minimum overlap over all poses were computed.Results:The fully and partially blocked nodes ranged from 12% to 20% and 13% to 27%, respectively. Typically, pose 3 caused the fewest blocked nodes. The cumulative overlap ranged from 19% to 29%. Taking the minimum overlap, i.e., considering moving the robot's elbow while maintaining the transducer pose, the cumulative over‐lap was reduced to 16% to 18% and was 3% to 6% lower than for the best individual pose.Conclusion:Our results indicate that it is possible to identify feasible ultrasound transducer poses and to use the kinematic redundancy of a 7 DOF robot to minimize the impact of the imaging subsystem on the feasible beam directions for ultrasound guided and motion compensated SBRT.Research partially funded by DFG grants ER 817/1‐1 and SCHL 1844/3‐1.
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