Projects:MGH-HeadAndNeck-RT

Problem Description

Proton therapy is used to deliver accurate doses of radiation to people undergoing cancer treatment. At the beginning of treatment, a personalized plan describing the amount of radiation and location to which it must be delivered is created for the patient. However, over the course of the treatment, which lasts weeks, a person's anatomy is likely to change. Adaptive radiotherapy aims to improve fractionated radiotherapy by re-optimizing the radiation treatment plan for each session. To update the plan, the CT images acquired during a treatment session are registered to the treatment plan and doses of radiation to be delivered are re-calculated accordingly. A correct segmentation is a pre-requisite for this dose re-optimization and is the starting point for this project.

Segmentation Algorithm

Initial se

Current State of Work

Future work on this method will include coupling the evolution of the interior and exterior surfaces so that information about local intensities and geometries can be shared in order to detect plaques more robustly. Furthermore, a larger study is planned in which a larger number of datasets will be analyzed, a quantitative analysis will be performed, and the method will be compared with intravascular ultrasound imagery to confirm the presence and composition of detected plaques. We believe this work has the potential of being an important step forward in automatically detecting non-calcified plaques, which have been clearly linked with the occurrence of heart attacks and stroke.

Publications

Abstract sumbitted for publication in SPIE Medical Imaging 2010

Key Investigators

Georgia Tech: Ivan Kolesov, Vandana Mohan, and Allen Tannenbaum Massachusetts General Hospital: Gregory Sharp