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SU‐C‐17A‐01: MRI‐Based Radiotherapy Treatment Planning In Pelvis
Author(s) -
Hsu S,
Cao Y,
Jolly S,
Balter J
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
medical physics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.473
H-Index - 180
eISSN - 2473-4209
pISSN - 0094-2405
DOI - 10.1118/1.4889728
Subject(s) - nuclear medicine , radiation therapy , medicine , voxel , radiation treatment planning , pelvis , dose volume histogram , magnetic resonance imaging , dosimetry , cone beam computed tomography , radiology , computed tomography
Purpose: To support radiotherapy dose calculation, synthetic CT (MRCT) image volumes need to represent the electron density of tissues with sufficient accuracy. This study compares CT and MRCT for pelvic radiotherapy. Methods: CT and multi‐contrast MRI acquired using T1‐ based Dixon, T2 TSE, and PETRA sequences were acquired on an IRBapproved protocol patient. A previously published method was used to create a MRCT image volume by applying fuzzy classification on T1‐ weighted and calculated water image volumes (air and fluid voxels were excluded using thresholds applied to PETRA and T2‐weighted images). The correlation of pelvic bone intensity between CT and MRCT was investigated. Two treatment plans, based on CT and MRCT, were performed to mimic treatment for: (a) pelvic bone metastasis with a 16MV parallel beam arrangement, and (b) gynecological cancer with 6MV volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) using two full arcs. The CT‐calculated fluence maps were used to recalculate doses using the MRCT‐derived density grid. The dose‐volume histograms and dose distributions were compared. Results: Bone intensities in the MRCT volume correlated linearly with CT intensities up to 800 HU (containing 96% of the bone volume), and then decreased with CT intensity increase (4% volume). There was no significant difference in dose distributions between CT‐ and MRCTbased plans, except for the rectum and bladder, for which the V45 differed by 15% and 9%, respectively. These differences may be attributed to normal and visualized organ movement and volume variations between CT and MR scans. Conclusion: While MRCT had lower bone intensity in highly‐dense bone, this did not cause significant dose deviations from CT due to its small percentage of volume. These results indicate that treatment planning using MRCT could generate comparable dose distributions to that using CT, and further demonstrate the feasibility of using MRI‐alone to support Radiation Oncology workflow. NIH R01EB016079