title: Lung diaphragm tracking in CBCT images using spatio-temporal MRF.
abstract: In EBRT in order to monitor the intra fraction motion of thoracic and abdominal tumors, one of the standard approaches is to use the lung diaphragm apex as an internal marker. However, tracking the position of the apex from image based observations is a challenging problem, as it undergoes both position and shape variation. The purpose of this paper is to propose an alternative method for tracking the ipsi-lateral hemidiaphragm apex (IHDA) position on Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) projection images. A hierarchical method is proposed to track the IHDA position across the frames. The diaphragm state is modeled as a spatio-temporal Markov Random Field (MRF). The likelihood function is derived from the votes based on 4D-Hough space. The optimal state of the diaphragm is obtained by solving the associated energy minimization problem using graph-cuts. A heterogeneous GPU implementation is provided for the method using CUDA framework and the performance is compared with that of CPU implementation. The method was tested using 15 clinical CBCT images. The results demonstrate that the MRF formulation outperforms the full search method in terms of accuracy. The GPU based heterogeneous implementation of the proposed algorithm takes about 25s, which is 16% improvement over the existing benchmark. The proposed MRF formulation considers all the possible combinations from the 4D-Hough space and therefore results in better tracking accuracy. The GPU based implementation exploits the inherent parallelism in our algorithm to accelerate the performance thereby increasing the viability of the approach for clinical use.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India; Siemens Healthcare Private Limited, No. 84, Keonics Electronics City, Hosur Road, Bangalore 560100, India. Electronic address: manivannan.sundarapandiyan@siemens.com.
authors.forename: Manivannan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sundarapandian
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore 560012, India. Electronic address: krr@ee.iisc.ernet.in.
authors.forename: Ramakrishnan
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kalpathi
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiation Oncology, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26505-9234, USA.
authors.forename: R Alfredo C
authors.initials: RA
authors.lastname: Siochi
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiotherapy, Victoria Hospital, Bangalore Medical College and Research Institute, Bangalore 560002, India.
authors.forename: Amrut S
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Kadam
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D054893:Cone-Beam Computed Tomography; D003964:Diaphragm / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D006801:Humans; D008168:Lung / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging* / Q000473:pathology; D009038:Motion
keywords: Cone-beam CT; Diaphragm motion; Graph-cuts; Markov Random Field