Program Information
Computing Longitudinal Material Changes in Bone Metastases Using Dual Energy Computed Tomography
CR Schmidtlein*, S Hwang , H Veeraraghavan , D Fehr , J Humm , J Deasy** , Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, New York, NY
Presentations
TU-A-12A-8 Tuesday 7:30AM - 9:30AM Room: 12APurpose: This study demonstrates a methodology for tracking changes in metastatic bone disease using trajectories in material basis space in serial dual energy computed tomography (DECT) studies.
Methods: This study includes patients with bone metastases from breast cancer that had clinical surveillance CT scans using a General Electric CT750HD in dual energy mode. A radiologist defined regions-of-interested (ROI) for bone metastasis, normal bone, and marrow across the serial DECT scans. Our approach employs a Radon transform to forward-projection the basis images, namely, water and iodine, into sinogram space. This data is then repartitioned into fat/bone and effective density/Z image pairs using assumed energy spectrums for the x-ray energies. This approach both helps remove negative material densities and avoids adding spectrum-hardening artifacts. These new basis data sets were then reconstructed via filtered back-projection to create new material basis pair images. The trajectories of these pairs were then plotted in the new basis space providing a means to both visualize and quantitatively measure changes in the material properties of the tumors.
Results: ROI containing radiologist defined metastatic bone disease showed well-defined trajectories in both fat/bone and effective density/Z space. ROI that contained radiologist defined normal bone and marrow did not exhibit any discernible trajectories and were stable from scan to scan.
Conclusions: The preliminary results show that changes in material composition and effective density/Z image pairs were seen primarily in metastasis and not in normal tissue. This study indicates that by using routine clinical DECT it may be possible to monitor therapy response of bone metastases because healing or worsening bone metastases change material composition of bone. Additional studies are needed to further validate these results and to test for their correlation with outcome.
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