Faculty, Staff and Student Publications
Publication Date
10-1-2024
Journal
Physics and Imaging in Radiation Oncology
Abstract
Multiple tools are available for commissioning and quality assurance of deformable image registration (DIR), each with their own advantages and disadvantages in the context of radiotherapy. The selection of appropriate tools should depend on the DIR application with its corresponding available input, desired output, and time requirement. Discussions were hosted by the ESTRO Physics Workshop 2021 on Commissioning and Quality Assurance for DIR in Radiotherapy. A consensus was reached on what requirements are needed for commissioning and quality assurance for different applications, and what combination of tools is associated with this. For commissioning, we recommend the target registration error of manually annotated anatomical landmarks or the distance-to-agreement of manually delineated contours to evaluate alignment. These should be supplemented by the distance to discordance and/or biomechanical criteria to evaluate consistency and plausibility. Digital phantoms can be useful to evaluate DIR for dose accumulation but are currently only available for a limited range of anatomies, image modalities and types of deformations. For quality assurance of DIR for contour propagation, we recommend at least a visual inspection of the registered image and contour. For quality assurance of DIR for warping quantitative information such as dose, Hounsfield units or positron emission tomography-data, we recommend visual inspection of the registered image together with image similarity to evaluate alignment, supplemented by an inspection of the Jacobian determinant or bending energy to evaluate plausibility, and by the dose (gradient) to evaluate relevance. We acknowledge that some of these metrics are still missing in currently available commercial solutions.
Keywords
Quality Assurance, Commissioning, Validation, Verification, Deformable image registration, Dose warping
DOI
10.1016/j.phro.2024.100647
PMID
39328928
PMCID
PMC11424976
PubMedCentral® Posted Date
9-14-2024
PubMedCentral® Full Text Version
Post-print
Published Open-Access
yes
Included in
Bioinformatics Commons, Biomedical Informatics Commons, Medical Sciences Commons, Oncology Commons, Radiation Medicine Commons