Background

In radiotherapy, to goal is to deliver a high dose of ionizing radiation to the tumor, while minimizing the dose to nearby healthy tissue. High geometrical treatment accuracy is therefore crucial. However, anatomical changes - of different orders of magnitude and over different time scales - can occur throughout the patient’s body. Some examples are motion caused through patient breathing, cardiac motion, bowel movement or bladder filling, but also tumor progression or regression.
To quantify and manage possible breathing induced tumor motion before radiotherapy treatment, a 4DCT can be acquired. This imaging modality represents the patient anatomy in 6-10 phases of the patient’s breathing cycle and as such gives an overview of the occurring motion. However, due to irregular breathing and the specific acquisition protocols, the 4DCT often also contains motion artifacts, which have already been shown to be correlated to treatment outcome in one single-center study.

Goals

The purpose of this work is to retrospectively evaluate 4DCT image quality of a pre-defined cohort of patients and investigate whether the results correlate to treatment outcome. In this study, part of the quantitative 4DCT quality evaluation will have to be developed, and preferably automated, by the student. A database will be created to include patient specific data such as target volume, target motion in 4d images, breathing irregularity-related measures, and clinical data (chemotherapy prior to SBRT, target dose, treatment fractionation). Follow up data collection will also be a major part of the study.

Prerequisites

Strong interest in clinical data analysis

Supervisors

Dr. Manuela Burghelea
Contact: NicoletaManuela.burghelea@bordet.be

Dr. Ir. Jennifer Dhont
Contact: Jennifer.Dhont@bordet.be

olivier.debeir@ulb.be, nicolas.pauly@ulb.be