Frequency filtering based analysis on the cardiac induced lung tumor motion and its impact on the radiotherapy management.

PURPOSE/OBJECTIVES: Lung tumor motion may be impacted by heartbeat in addition to respiration. This study seeks to quantitatively analyze heart-motion-induced tumor motion and to evaluate its impact on lung cancer radiotherapy.

METHODS/MATERIALS: Fluoroscopy images were acquired for 30 lung cancer patients. Tumor, diaphragm, and heart were delineated on selected fluoroscopy frames, and their motion was tracked and converted into temporal signals based on deformable registration propagation. The clinical relevance of heart impact was evaluated using the dose volumetric histogram of the redefined target volumes.

RESULTS

Correlation was found between tumor and cardiac motion for 23 patients. The heart-induced motion amplitude ranged from 0.2 to 2.6 mm. The ratio between heart-induced tumor motion and the tumor motion was inversely proportional to the amplitude of overall tumor motion. When the heart motion impact was integrated, there was an average 9% increase in internal target volumes for 17 patients. Dose coverage decrease was observed on redefined planning target volume in simulated SBRT plans.

CONCLUSIONS

The tumor motion of thoracic cancer patients is influenced by both heart and respiratory motion. The cardiac impact is relatively more significant for tumor with less motion, which may lead to clinically significant uncertainty in radiotherapy for some patients.