Feasibility of Radiotherapy Fiducial Marker Tracking via Single-Shot X-ray Acoustic Tomography

Introductionin radiotherapy, fiducial markers improve the accuracy of radiation delivery, and their use has become increasingly important in the treatment of various cancers, particularly those in the prostate and lung. This work aims to determine, via Monte Carlo simulations and numerical ultrasound transport, the feasibility of fiducial marker localization via single-shot x-ray acoustic computed tomography.Methodspatient data from CT scans for two treatment sites, prostate and lung, were used to model the fiducial marker localization process. Monte Carlo simulation was used to calculate the absorbed dose distribution in each patient resulting from the irradiation with a 120 kVp x-ray imaging source, assuming that the dose is imparted in a short pulse. Ultrasound transport through each patient was modeled with the numerical ultrasound transport package k-Wave. For the image reconstruction process, as the exact internal patient structure will not be known at the time of treatment, a homogenous medium with the patient external contour and dimensions was used.ResultsIt is shown that the use of a homogeneous model to approximate the actual patient material composition during the reconstruction process, necessary as the geometry of the internal structures is not known at the time of the treatment, severely degrades the quality of the x-ray acoustic tomography images, but that it is still possible to determine the fiducial marker position with an accuracy of or better than 1 mm. The largest errors are observed for the lung patient when the lung is in an inflated state.Conclusionsit has been shown that single-shot x-ray acoustic tomography can be an effective tool for the tracking and localization of radiotherapy fiducial markers, exhibiting an accuracy of better than 1 mm, despite the poor visual quality of the resultant images.