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Title: Distance-preserving rigidity penalty on deformable image registration of multiple skeletal components in the neck

Journal Article · · Medical Physics
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1118/1.4828783· OSTI ID:22251896
;  [1]; ;  [2]
  1. Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109 (United States)
  2. Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109 (United States)

Purpose: This study aims at developing and testing a novel rigidity penalty suitable for the deformable registration of tightly located skeletal components in the head and neck from planning computed tomography (CT) and daily cone-beam CT (CBCT) scans of patients undergoing radiotherapy. Methods: The proposed rigidity penalty is designed to preserve intervoxel distances within each bony structure. This penalty was tested in the intensity-based B-spline deformable registration of five cervical vertebral bodies (C1–C5). The displacement vector fields (DVFs) from the registrations were compared to the DVFs generated by using rigid body motions of the cervical vertebrae, measured by the surface registration of vertebrae delineated on CT and CBCT images. Twenty five pairs of planning CT (reference) and treatment CBCTs (target) from five patients were aligned without and with the penalty. An existing penalty based on the orthonormality of the deformation gradient tensor was also tested and the effects of the penalties compared. Results: The mean magnitude of the maximum registration error with the proposed distance-preserving penalty was (0.86, 1.12, 1.33) mm compared to (2.11, 2.49, 2.46) without penalty and (1.53, 1.64, 1.64) with the existing orthonormality-based penalty. The improvement in the accuracy of the deformable image registration was also verified by comparing the Procrustes distance between the DVFs. With the proposed penalty, the average distance was 0.11 (σ 0.03 mm) which is smaller than 0.53 (0.1 mm) without penalty and 0.28 (0.04 mm) with the orthonormality-based penalty. Conclusions: The accuracy of aligning multiple bony elements was improved by using the proposed distance-preserving rigidity penalty. The voxel-based statistical analysis of the registration error shows that the proposed penalty improved the integrity of the DVFs within the vertebral bodies.

OSTI ID:
22251896
Journal Information:
Medical Physics, Vol. 40, Issue 12; Other Information: (c) 2013 American Association of Physicists in Medicine; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0094-2405
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English