Automated contour mapping using sparse volume sampling for 4D radiation therapy.

The purpose of this work is to develop a novel strategy to automatically map organ contours from one phase of respiration to all other phases on a four-dimensional computed tomography (4D CT). A region of interest (ROI) was manually delineated by a physician on one phase specific image set of a 4D CT. A number of cubic control volumes of the size of approximately 1 cm were automatically placed along the contours. The control volumes were then collectively mapped to the next phase using a rigid transformation. To accommodate organ deformation, a model-based adaptation of the control volume positions was followed after the rigid mapping procedure. This further adjustment of control volume positions was performed by minimizing an energy function which balances the tendency for the control volumes to move to their correspondences with the desire to maintain similar image features and shape integrity of the contour. The mapped ROI surface was then constructed based on the central positions of the control volumes using a triangulated surface construction technique. The proposed technique was assessed using a digital phantom and 4D CT images of three lung patients. Our digital phantom study data indicated that a spatial accuracy better than 2.5 mm is achievable using the proposed technique. The patient study showed a similar level of accuracy. In addition, the computational speed of our algorithm was significantly improved as compared with a conventional deformable registration-based contour mapping technique. The robustness and accuracy of this approach make it a valuable tool for the efficient use of the available spatial-tempo information for 4D simulation and treatment.

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