Implicit Feature-Based Alignment System for Radiotherapy

Abstract

In this paper we present a robust alignment algorithm for correcting the effects of out-of-plane rotation to be used for automatic alignment of the Computed Tomography (CT) volumes and the generally low quality fluoroscopic images for radiotherapy applications. Analyzing not only in-plane but also out-of-plane rotation effects on the Dignitary Reconstructed Radiograph (DRR) images, we develop simple alignment algorithm that extracts a set of implicit features from DRR. Using these SIFT-based features, we align DRRs with the fluoroscopic images of the patient and evaluate the alignment accuracy. We compare our approach with traditional techniques based on gradient-based operators and show that our algorithm performs faster while in most cases delivering higher accuracy.