Deformable image registration of CT and truncated cone-beam CT for adaptive radiation therapy

Truncation of a cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) image, mainly caused by the limited field of view (FOV) of CBCT imaging, poses challenges to the problem of deformable image registration (DIR) between computed tomography (CT) and CBCT images in adaptive radiation therapy (ART). The missing information outside the CBCT FOV usually causes incorrect deformations when a conventional DIR algorithm is utilized, which may introduce significant errors in subsequent operations such as dose calculation. In this paper, based on the observation that the missing information in the CBCT image domain does exist in the projection image domain, we propose to solve this problem by developing a hybrid deformation/reconstruction algorithm. As opposed to deforming the CT image to match the truncated CBCT image, the CT image is deformed such that its projections match all the corresponding projection images for the CBCT image. An iterative forward-backward projection algorithm is developed. Six head-and-neck cancer patient cases are used to evaluate our algorithm, five with simulated truncation and one with real truncation. It is found that our method can accurately register the CT image to the truncated CBCT image and is robust against image truncation when the portion of the truncated image is less than 40% of the total image.