Extracting lung contour deformation features with deep learning for internal target motion tracking: a preliminary study.

Journal: Physics in medicine and biology
PMID:

Abstract

. To propose lung contour deformation features (LCDFs) as a surrogate to estimate the thoracic internal target motion, and to report their performance by correlating with the changing body using a cascade ensemble model (CEM). LCDFs, correlated to the respiration driver, are employed without patient-specific motion data sampling and additional training before treatment.. LCDFs are extracted by matching lung contours via an encoder-decoder deep learning model. CEM estimates LCDFs from the currently captured body, and then uses the estimated LCDFs to track internal target motion. The accuracy of the proposed LCDFs and CEM were evaluated using 48 targets' motion data, and compared with other published methods.. LCDFs estimated the internal targets with a localization error of 2.6 ± 1.0 mm (average ± standard deviation). CEM reached a localization error of 4.7 ± 0.9 mm and a real-time performance of 256.9 ± 6.0 ms. With no internal anatomy knowledge, they achieved a small accuracy difference (of 0.34∼1.10 mm for LCDFs and of 0.43∼1.75 mm for CEM at the 95% confidence level) with a patient-specific lung biomechanical model and the deformable image registration models.. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of LCDFs and CEM on tracking target motion. LCDFs and CEM are non-invasive, and require no patient-specific training before treatment. They show potential for broad applications.

Authors

  • Jie Zhang
    College of Physical Education and Health, Linyi University, Linyi, Shandong, China.
  • Yajuan Wang
    College of Mathematical Medicine, Zhejiang Normal University, Jinhua 321004, China.
  • Xue Bai
    School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Shandong University, Jinan, China.
  • Ming Chen
    Department of Critical Care Medicine, Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, The Affiliated Hospital of Nanjing University Medical School, Nanjing, Jiangsu, China.