A phantom study to create synthetic CT from orthogonal twodimensional cine MRI and evaluate the effect of irregular breathing.

Abstract

An exciting innovation in radiotherapy is the use of real-time MRI for treatment adaptation. This study proposes an in-silico framework for the generation of 3D synthetic CT (sCT) from orthogonal interleaved 2D cine MRI data to overcome the lack of electron density information in MR images. The method uses pre-treatment data to build a patient breathing motion model. This model is then driven by surrogates extracted from cine MR images during the treatment. The effect of irregular breathing on the motion model is also evaluated by simulating different motion components related to uncorrelated diaphragm, chest and tumor motion. 3D sCT were successfully created for each of the 512 cine MRI pairs in the digital phantom study. The analysis showed that the diaphragm position was a good surrogate to rescale the 3D breathing motion for the current regular breathing phase. However, respiratory and tumor motion were correlated in only 59% of the phases, resulting in tumor position uncertainties of up to 3mm. The inclusion of additional chest and tumor motion information improved the accuracy for irregular changes in breathing pattern and enhanced the tumor position uncertainties to less than 1mm. This study successfully demonstrated a proof-ofprinciple for a digital phantom dataset based on patient parameters, providing a way to create real-time 3D electron density volumes and enhancing the need to account for irregular breathing pattern.