Program Information

Quantifying the Image Quality and Dose Reduction of Respiratory Triggered 4D Cone-Beam Computed Tomography with Patient-Measured Breathing

B Cooper*, R OBrien , J Kipritidis , P Keall , The University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales

Presentations

SU-E-J-183 Sunday 3:00PM - 6:00PM Room: Exhibit Hall

Purpose:
Respiratory triggered four dimensional cone-beam computed tomography (RT 4D CBCT) is a novel technique that uses a patient's respiratory signal to drive the image acquisition with the goal of imaging dose reduction without degrading image quality. This work investigates image quality and dose using patient-measured respiratory signals for RT 4D CBCT simulations instead of synthetic sinusoidal signals used in previous work.

Methods:
Studies were performed that simulate a 4D CBCT image acquisition using both the novel RT 4D CBCT technique and a conventional 4D CBCT technique from a database of oversampled Rando phantom CBCT projections. A database containing 111 free breathing lung cancer patient respiratory signal files was used to create 111 RT 4D CBCT and 111 conventional 4D CBCT image datasets from realistic simulations of a 4D RT CBCT system. Each of these image datasets were compared to a ground truth dataset from which a root mean square error (RMSE) metric was calculated to quantify the degradation of image quality. The number of projections used in each simulation is counted and was assumed as a surrogate for imaging dose.

Results:
Based on 111 breathing traces, when comparing RT 4D CBCT with conventional 4D CBCT the average image quality was reduced by 7.6%. However, the average imaging dose reduction was 53% based on needing fewer projections (617 on average) than conventional 4D CBCT (1320 projections).

Conclusion:
The simulation studies using a wide range of patient breathing traces have demonstrated that the RT 4D CBCT method can potentially offer a substantial saving of imaging dose of 53% on average compared to conventional 4D CBCT in simulation studies with a minimal impact on image quality.

Funding Support, Disclosures, and Conflict of Interest: A patent application (PCT/US2012/048693) has been filed which is related to this work.

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