Summary
Objectives: A major problem associated with the irradiation of thoracic and abdominal tumors
is respiratory motion. In clinical practice, motion compensation approaches are frequently
steered by low-dimensional breathing signals (e.g., spirometry) and patient-specific
correspondence models, which are used to estimate the sought internal motion given
a signal measurement. Recently, the use of multidimensional signals derived from range
images of the moving skin surface has been proposed to better account for complex
motion patterns. In this work, a simulation study is carried out to investigate the
motion estimation accuracy of such multidimensional signals and the influence of noise,
the signal dimensionality, and different sampling patterns (points, lines, regions).
Methods: A diffeomorphic correspondence modeling framework is employed to relate multidimensional
breathing signals derived from simulated range images to internal motion patterns
represented by diffeomorphic non-linear transformations. Furthermore, an automatic
approach for the selection of optimal signal combinations/patterns within this framework
is presented.
Results: This simulation study focuses on lung motion estimation and is based on 28 4D CT
data sets. The results show that the use of multidimensional signals instead of one-dimensional
signals significantly improves the motion estimation accuracy, which is, however,
highly affected by noise. Only small differences exist between different multidimensional
sampling patterns (lines and regions). Automatically determined optimal combinations
of points and lines do not lead to accuracy improvements compared to results obtained
by using all points or lines.
Conclusions: Our results show the potential of multidimensional breathing signals derived from
range images for the model-based estimation of respiratory motion in radiation therapy.
Keywords
Respiratory motion - motion estimation - correspondence modeling - regression - image
registration