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Program Information

Development and Evaluation of a Prototype Ultrasonography Respiratory Monitoring System for 4DCT Reconstruction


P Yan

P Yan1*, A Jain2 , S Cheng1 , C Chao1 , (1) Columbia University Medical Center, New York, NY, (2) New York Presbyterian Hospital, New York, NY

Presentations

SU-D-17A-7 Sunday 2:05PM - 3:00PM Room: 17A

Purpose:
Respiratory motion artifacts are commonly seen in the abdominal and thoracic CT images. A Real-time Position Management (RPM) system is integrated with CT simulator using abdominal surface as a surrogate for tracking the patient respiratory motion. The respiratory-correlated four-dimensional computed tomography (4DCT) is then reconstructed by GE advantage software. However, there are still artifacts due to inaccurate respiratory motion detecting and sorting methods. We developed an Ultrasonography Respiration Monitoring (URM) system which can directly monitor diaphragm motion to detect respiratory cycles. We also developed a new 4DCT sorting and motion estimation method to reduce the respiratory motion artifacts. The new 4DCT system was compared with RPM and the GE 4DCT system.

Methods:Imaging from a GE CT scanner was simultaneously correlated with both the RPM and URM to detect respiratory motion. A radiation detector, Blackcat GM-10, recorded the X-ray on/off and synchronized with URM. The diaphragm images were acquired with Ultrasonix RP system. The respiratory wave was derived from diaphragm images and synchronized with CT scanner. A more precise peaks and valleys detection tool was developed and compared with RPM. The motion is estimated for the slices which are not in the predefined respiratory phases by using block matching and optical flow method. The CT slices were then sorted into different phases and reconstructed, compared with the images reconstructed from GE Advantage software using respiratory wave produced from RPM system.

Results:The 4DCT images were reconstructed for eight patients. The discontinuity at the diaphragm level due to an inaccurate identification of phases by the RPM was significantly improved by URM system.

Conclusion:Our URM 4DCT system was evaluated and compared with RPM and GE 4DCT system. The new system is user friendly and able to reduce motion artifacts. It also has the potential to monitor organ motion during therapy.


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