Automatic Construction of Immobilisation Masks for use in Radiotherapy Treatment of Head-and-Neck Cancer

Ryalat, Mohammad (2017) Automatic Construction of Immobilisation Masks for use in Radiotherapy Treatment of Head-and-Neck Cancer. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

Current clinical practice for immobilisation for patients undergoing brain or head and neck radiotherapy is normally achieved using Perspex or thermoplastic shells that are moulded to patient anatomy during a visit to the mould room. The shells are “made to measure” and the methods currently employed to make them require patients to visit the mould room. The mould room visit can be depressing and some patients find this process particularly unpleasant. In some cases, as treatment progresses, the tumour may shrink and therefore there may be a need for a further mould room visits. With modern manufacturing and rapid prototyping comes the possibility of determining the shape of the shells from the CT-scan of the patient directly, alleviating the need for making physical moulds from the patients’ head. However, extracting such a surface model remains a challenge and is the focus of this thesis. The aim of the work in this thesis is to develop an automatic pipeline capable of creating physical models of immobilisation shells directly from CT scans. The work includes an investigation of a number of image segmentation techniques to segment the skin/air interface from CT images. To enable the developed pipeline to be quantitatively evaluated we compared the 3D model generated from the CT data to ground truth obtained by 3D laser scans of masks produced by the mould room in the frame of a clinical trial. This involved automatically removing image artefacts due to fixations from CT imagery, automatic alignment (registration) between two meshes, measuring the degree of similarity between two 3D volumes, and automatic approach to evaluate the accuracy of segmentation. This thesis has raised and addressed many challenges within this pipeline. We have examined and evaluated each stage of the pipeline separately. The outcomes of the pipeline as a whole are currently being evaluated by a clinical trial (IRAS ID:209119, REC Ref.:16/YH/0485). Early results from the trial indicate that the approach is viable.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Computing Sciences
Depositing User:	Users 9280 not found.
Date Deposited:	23 Mar 2018 11:05
Last Modified:	23 Mar 2018 11:05
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/66573
DOI:

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