Fast calculation of the exact radiological path for a three-dimensional CT array

Ready availability has prompted the use of computed tomography (CT) data in various applications in radiation therapy. For example, some radiation treatment planning systems now utilize CT data in heterogeneous dose calculations algorithms. In radiotherapy imaging applications, CT data are projected onto specified planes, thus producing "radiographs," which are compared with simulator radiographs to assist in proper patient positioning and delineation of target volumes. All these applications share the common geometric problem of evaluating the radiological path through the CT array. Due to the complexity of the three-dimensional geometry and the enormous amount of CT data, the exact evaluation of the radiological path has proven to be a time consuming and difficult problem. This paper identifies the inefficient aspect of the traditional exact evaluation of the radiological path as that of treating the CT data as individual voxels. Rather than individual voxels, a new exact algorithm is presented that considers the CT data as consisting of the intersection volumes of three orthogonal sets of equally spaced, parallel planes. For a three-dimensional CT array of N3 voxels, the new exact algorithm scales with 3N, the number of planes, rather than N3, the number of voxels. Coded in FORTRAN-77 on a VAX 11/780 with a floating point option, the algorithm requires approximately 5 ms to calculate an average radiological path in a 100(3) voxel array.