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Evaluation of Five Commercially-Available Algorithms for Deformable Image Registration


A Shah

A Shah1*, J Pukala2 , P Johnson3 , R Staton4 , S Meeks5 , (1) UF Health Cancer Center at Orlando Health, Orlando, FL, (2) UF Health Cancer Center at Orlando Health, Orlando, FL, (3) University of Miami, Miami, FL, (4) UF Health Cancer Center at Orlando Health, Orlando, FL, (5) UF Health Cancer Center at Orlando Health, Orlando, FL

Presentations

SU-F-BRF-4 Sunday 4:00PM - 6:00PM Room: Ballroom F

Purpose: Deformable image registration (DIR) is increasingly being used in various clinical applications. Although there are several DIR packages all making successful attempts at modeling complex anatomical changes using even more complex mathematical approximations, they are all subject to various uncertainties. Many studies have attempted to quantify the spatial uncertainty with DIR. This is the first study to compare the uncertainty for interfraction DIR for 5 different commercially-available algorithms. The aim of this study was to benchmark the performance of the most commonly-used DIR algorithms offered through these 5 software packages: Eclipse, MIM, Pinnacle, RaySearch, and Velocity.

Methods: A set of 10 virtual H&N phantoms [Pukala et al. MedPhys. 40(11) 2013] with known deformations were used to determine the spatial errors that might be seen when performing DIR. The “ground-truth” deformation vector field (DVF) was compared to the DVF output of the 5 commercially-available algorithms in order to evaluate spatial errors for six regions of interest (ROIs): brainstem, cord, mandible, left parotid, right parotid, and the external body contour.

Results: We found that each software package had varying uncertainties with the various ROIs, but were generally all comparable to one another – with mean spatial errors for each algorithm below 3.5 mm for each ROI (averaged across all phantoms). We also found that no single algorithm was the clear winner over the other 4 algorithms. However, at times, we found huge maximum errors in our results (e.g. phantom #9 maximum errors: right parotid = 22.9 mm, external contour = 30.5mm) with the varying DIR algorithms.

Conclusion: Although our evaluation was limited to H&N patients, we show that our methods are a single-assessment analysis tool that could be used by any physicist, within any type of facility, to compare their DIR software before initiating widespread use within their daily radiotherapy practice.


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