Generation of a local lung respiratory motion model using a weighted sparse algorithm and motion prior-based registration.

Respiration-introduced tumor location uncertainty is a challenge in lung percutaneous interventions, especially for the respiratory motion estimation of the tumor and surrounding vessel structures. In this work, a local motion modeling method is proposed based on whole-chest computed tomography (CT) and CT-fluoroscopy (CTF) scans. A weighted sparse statistical modeling (WSSM) method that can accurately capture location errors for each landmark point is proposed for lung motion prediction. By varying the sparse weight coefficients of the WSSM method, newly input motion information is approximately represented by a sparse linear combination of the respiratory motion repository and employed to serve as prior knowledge for the following registration process. We have also proposed an adaptive motion prior-based registration method to improve the motion prediction accuracy of the motion model in the region of interest (ROI). This registration method adopts a B-spline scheme to interactively weight the relative influence of the prior knowledge, model surface and image intensity information by locally controlling the deformation in the CTF image region. The proposed method has been evaluated on 15 image pairs between the end-expiratory (EE) and end-inspiratory (EI) phases and 31 four-dimensional CT (4DCT) datasets. The results reveal that the proposed WSSM method achieved a better motion prediction performance than other existing lung statistical motion modeling methods, and the motion prior-based registration method can generate more accurate local motion information in the ROI.