4D NURBS-based Cardiac-torso Phantom Research Articles

TH-CD-207A-03: A Surface Deformation Driven Respiratory Model for Organ Motion Tracking in Lung Cancer Radiotherapy

Purpose: To propose and validate a novel real-time surface-mesh-based internal organ-external surface motion and deformation tracking method for lung cancer radiotherapy. Methods: Deformation vector fields (DVFs) which characterizes the internal and external motion are obtained by registering the internal organ and tumor contours and external surface meshes to a reference phase in the 4D CT images using a recent developed local topology preserved non-rigid point matching algorithm (TOP). A composite matrix is constructed by combing the estimated internal and external DVFs. Principle component analysis (PCA) is then applied on the composite matrix to extract principal motion characteristics and finally yield the respiratory motion model parameters which correlates the internal and external motion and deformation. The accuracy of the respiratory motion model is evaluated using a 4D NURBS-based cardiac-torso (NCAT) synthetic phantom and three lung cancer cases. The center of mass (COM) difference is used to measure the tumor motion tracking accuracy, and the Dice's coefficient (DC), percent error (PE) and Housdourf's distance (HD) are used to measure the agreement between the predicted and ground truth tumor shape. Results: The mean COM is 0.84±0.49mm and 0.50±0.47mm for the phantom and patient data respectively. The mean DC, PE and HD are 0.93±0.01, 0.13±0.03 and 1.24±0.34 voxels for the phantom, and 0.91±0.04, 0.17±0.07 and 3.93±2.12 voxels for the three lung cancer patients, respectively. Conclusions: We have proposed and validate a real-time surface-mesh-based organ motion and deformation tracking method with an internal-external motion modeling. The preliminary results conducted on a synthetic 4D NCAT phantom and 4D CT images from three lung cancer cases show that the proposed method is reliable and accurate in tracking both the tumor motion trajectory and deformation, which can serve as a potential tool for real-time organ motion and deformation monitoring in lung cancer radiotherapy. This work is supported in part by grant from VARIAN MEDICAL SYSTEMS INC, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (no 81428019 and no 81301940), the Guangdong Natural Science Foundation (2015A030313302)and the 2015 Pearl River S&T Nova Program of Guangzhou (201506010096).

The development and initial evaluation of a realistic simulated SPECT dataset with simultaneous respiratory and cardiac motion for gated myocardial perfusion SPECT

We developed a realistic simulation dataset for simultaneous respiratory and cardiac (R&C) gated SPECT/CT using the 4D NURBS-based Cardiac-Torso (NCAT) Phantom and Monte Carlo simulation methods, and evaluated it for a sample application study. The 4D NCAT phantom included realistic respiratory motion and beating heart motion based on respiratory gated CT and cardiac tagged MRI data of normal human subjects. To model the respiratory motion, a set of 24 separate 3D NCAT phantoms excluding the heart was generated over a respiratory cycle. The beating heart motion was modeled separately with 48 frames per cardiac cycle for each of the 24 respiratory phases. The resultant set of 24 × 48 3D NCAT phantoms provides a realistic model of a normal human subject at different phases of combined R&C motions. An almost noise-free SPECT projection dataset for each of the 1152 3D NCAT phantoms was generated using Monte Carlo simulation techniques and the radioactivity uptake distribution of 99mTc sestamibi in different organs. By grouping and summing the separate projection datasets, separate or simultaneous R&C gated acquired data with different gating schemes could be simulated. In the initial evaluation, we combined the projection datasets into ungated, 6 respiratory-gates only, 8 cardiac-gates only, and combined 6 respiratory-gates & 8 cardiac-gates projection datasets. Each dataset was reconstructed using 3D OS-EM without and with attenuation correction using the averaged and respiratory-gated attenuation maps, and the resulting reconstructed images were compared. These results were used to demonstrate the effects of R&C motions and the reduction of image artifact due to R&C motions by gating and attenuation corrections. We concluded that the realistic 4D NCAT phantom and Monte Carlo simulated SPECT projection datasets with R&C motions are powerful tools in the study of the effects of R&C motions, as well as in the development of R&C gating schemes and motion correction methods for improved SPECT/CT imaging.