automatic contour delineation
In collaboration with the Radiotherapy Division of the European Institute of Oncology (Milan)
Cart Laboratory of Politecnico di Milano University
Radiation therapy is one of the two steps for common treatment of head and neck Hodgkin/non Hodgkin lymphoma. Unfortunately, in this scenario, clear and accurate localization of tissues to irradiate by radiation is not always easy and obvious, especially after chemotherapy treatment.
This makes the contouring process very challenging and prone to mistakes, even for expert physicians. The purpose of our work is to support the radiotherapists during the definition of clinical target volume for radiotherapy of this kind of cancer.
We propose to localize the gross target volume onto the simulation CT using pre chemotherapy [18F]FDGPET/CT information and deformable image registration technique. The primitive disease extent brought on the simulation CT can be so used as starting point to easier manually define the whole volume to treat.
As a result of the our tests the methodology proved to perform well, being able to identify the initial cancerous site also in very challenge clinical situations, as enormous difference in patient’s position between scans.
