Clinical Implementation of Dual-energy CT for Proton Treatment Planning on Pseudo-monoenergetic CT scans

Abstract

A standardized clinical use of MonoCT for treatment planning is feasible, leads to improved image quality and SPR prediction, extends diagnostic variety, and enables a stepwise clinical implementation of DECT toward a physics-based, patient-specific, nonheuristic SPR determination. Further reductions of CT-related uncertainties, as expected from such SPR approaches, can be evaluated on the resulting DECT patient database.

Comment on: Dosimetric comparison of stopping‐power calibration with dual‐energy CT and single‐energy CT in proton therapy treatment planning [Med. Phys. 43(6), 2845‐2854 (2016)]

“…(a) of Zhu and Penfold using the same polymers as presented by the authors. The stoichiometric CT number prediction was calibrated by analogy with Zhu and Penfold using tissue surrogates of CIRS (Model 731‐ HN , CIRS , Inc., Norfolk, VA , USA ) and additionally Gammex (Sun Nuclear GmbH, Neu‐Isenburg, Germany). In contrast to Fig.…”

A Bayesian approach to solve proton stopping powers from noisy multi‐energy CT data

“…To overcome the degeneracy issue of SPRs with CT numbers, promising applications with DECT were recently proposed . By using two distinctive energy spectra during a same acquisition, DECT allows separating the measured data in two independent variables, such the electron density (ED) and the effective atomic number (EAN), or basis material weights and density.…”

Theoretical and experimental analysis of photon counting detector CT for proton stopping power prediction

“…Several recent studies have investigated how to improve stopping power ratio (SPR) estimations with the aim of improving the accuracy of CT‐based dose calculations in proton therapy. These studies include investigations on how to perform a robust calibration of the conversion from CT numbers in conventional single‐energy CT (SECT) to SPR, the influence of beam hardening (BH), the use of dual‐energy CT (DECT), as well as the use of proton CT . It has been shown in several studies that DECT gives more accurate SPR estimates than SECT using the stoichiometric method proposed by Schneider et al …”