Tang Long, Zheng Mengxun, Liang Peiwen, Li Zifeng, Zhu Yongqi, Zhang Hua
School of Biomedical Engineering, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou 510515, China.
Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Medical Image Processing, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou 510515, China.
Sensors (Basel). 2024 Dec 25;25(1):39. doi: 10.3390/s25010039.
Megavoltage computed tomography (MVCT) plays a crucial role in patient positioning and dose reconstruction during tomotherapy. However, due to the limited scan field of view (sFOV), the entire cross-section of certain patients may not be fully covered, resulting in projection data truncation. Truncation artifacts in MVCT can compromise registration accuracy with the planned kilovoltage computed tomography (KVCT) and hinder subsequent MVCT-based adaptive planning. To address this issue, we propose a Prior-FOVNet to correct the truncation artifacts and extend the field of view (eFOV) by leveraging material and shape priors learned from the KVCT of the same patient. Specifically, to address the intensity discrepancies between different imaging modalities, we employ a contrastive learning-based GAN, named TransNet, to transform KVCT images into synthesized MVCT (sMVCT) images. The sMVCT images, along with pre-corrected MVCT images obtained via sinogram extrapolation, are then input into a Swin Transformer-based image inpainting network for artifact correction and FOV extension. Experimental results using both simulated and real patient data demonstrate that our method outperforms existing truncation correction techniques in reducing truncation artifacts and reconstructing anatomical structures beyond the sFOV. It achieves the lowest MAE of 23.8 ± 5.6 HU and the highest SSIM of 97.8 ± 0.6 across the test dataset, thereby enhancing the reliability and clinical applicability of MVCT in adaptive radiotherapy.
兆伏级计算机断层扫描(MVCT)在断层放疗期间的患者定位和剂量重建中起着至关重要的作用。然而,由于扫描视野(sFOV)有限,某些患者的整个横截面可能无法完全覆盖,导致投影数据截断。MVCT中的截断伪影会影响与计划千伏计算机断层扫描(KVCT)的配准精度,并阻碍后续基于MVCT的自适应计划。为了解决这个问题,我们提出了一种Prior-FOVNet,通过利用从同一患者的KVCT中学习到的材料和形状先验来校正截断伪影并扩展视野(eFOV)。具体来说,为了解决不同成像模态之间的强度差异,我们采用一种基于对比学习的生成对抗网络(GAN),名为TransNet,将KVCT图像转换为合成MVCT(sMVCT)图像。然后,将sMVCT图像与通过正弦图外推获得的预校正MVCT图像输入到基于Swin Transformer的图像修复网络中,以进行伪影校正和视野扩展。使用模拟和真实患者数据的实验结果表明,我们的方法在减少截断伪影和重建sFOV之外的解剖结构方面优于现有的截断校正技术。在整个测试数据集中,它实现了最低的平均绝对误差(MAE)为23.8±5.6 HU和最高的结构相似性指数(SSIM)为97.8±0.6,从而提高了MVCT在自适应放疗中的可靠性和临床适用性。