Program Information

Internal Respiratory Surrogate for 4D CT Using Fourier Transform and Anatomical Features

C Hui

C Hui*, Y Suh , D Robertson , T Pan , P Das , C Crane , S Beddar , UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, Houston, TX

Presentations

TH-E-17A-1 Thursday 1:00PM - 2:50PM Room: 17A

Purpose: To develop a novel algorithm to generate internal respiratory signals for sorting of four-dimensional (4D) computed tomography (CT) images.

Methods: The proposed algorithm extracted multiple time resolved features as potential respiratory signals. These features were taken from the 4D CT images and its Fourier transformed space. Several low-frequency locations in the Fourier space and selected anatomical features from the images were used as potential respiratory signals. A clustering algorithm was then used to search for the group of appropriate potential respiratory signals. The chosen signals were then normalized and averaged to form the final internal respiratory signal. Performance of the algorithm was tested in 50 4D CT data sets and results were compared with external signals from the real-time position management (RPM) system.

Results: In almost all cases, the proposed algorithm generated internal respiratory signals that visibly matched the external respiratory signals from the RPM system. On average, the end inspiration times calculated by the proposed algorithm were within 0.1 s of those given by the RPM system. Less than 3% of the calculated end inspiration times were more than one time frame away from those given by the RPM system. In 3 out of the 50 cases, the proposed algorithm generated internal respiratory signals that were significantly smoother than the RPM signals. In these cases, images sorted using the internal respiratory signals showed fewer artifacts in locations corresponding to the discrepancy in the internal and external respiratory signals.

Conclusion: We developed a robust algorithm that generates internal respiratory signals from 4D CT images. In some cases, it even showed the potential to outperform the RPM system. The proposed algorithm is completely automatic and generally takes less than 2 min to process. It can be easily implemented into the clinic and can potentially replace the use of external surrogates.


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