3D Dynamic Body Surface Sensing and CT-Body Matching: A Tool for Patient Set-Up and Monitoring in Radiotherapy

Abstract

Recent advances in radical broad-beam conformal radiotherapy for disease at nonrigid sites suggest that the treatment room set-up of patients should be performed using the CT-plan digital body surface as a reference standard. In effect, the CT-plan surface is a "virtual shell" and should be used as such. T o do this requires 3D body surface information to be captured live in the treatment room and then manipulated for comparison with the C T virtual shell.T o address this situation, a near real-time prototype opto-electronic dynamic 3D surface sensor has been developed and equipped with a novel software utility for visualizing and matching the disparate surfaces arising from planning and treatment environments. Using the C T virtual shell and height-maps produced by the sensor, a two-phase 3D positioning strategy for patient set-up and monitoring is described. Phase one is an image-guided manual "approach". Phase two is automated "docking" using simulated annealing to determine optimum set-up corrections. The concepts and implementation are illustrated using archival patient data and an anthropomorphic phantom "patient" in a treatment room environment. Comp Aid Surg 5: 234-245 (2000). 02000 Wiley-Liss, hc.

A high-resolution three-dimensional far-infrared thermal and true-color imaging system for medical applications

“…Typical examples involve plastic surgery evaluation [1], radiotherapy navigation [2,3], and tumor detection [4]. At the moment, the main medical information gleaned from the body surface includes the dimensions [5,6], color [7], and temperature [4,8].…”

A Neural Network Based Method for Optical Patient Set-up Registration in Breast Radiotherapy

“…3,4,12,13 These techniques allow one to overcome the limits of opto-electronic passive markers based systems, but their real-time application, including the online detection of the breathing phase, turns out to be unfeasible.…”