Abstract

PURPOSE: To develop and evaluate a deep unsupervised learning (DUL) framework based on a regional deformable model for automated prostate contour propagation from planning computed tomography (pCT) to cone-beam CT (CBCT).METHODS: We introduce a DUL model to map the prostate contour from pCT to on-treatment CBCT. The DUL framework used a regional deformable model via narrow band mapping to augment the conventional strategy. 251 anonymized CBCT images from prostate cancer patients were retrospectively selected and divided into three sets: 180 were used for training, 12 for validation, and 59 for testing. The testing dataset was divided into two Groups. Group one contained 50 CBCT volumes, with one physician-generated prostate contour on CBCT image. Group two contained 9 CBCT images, each including prostate contours delineated by four independent physicians and a consensus contour generated using the STAPLE method. Results were compared between the proposed DUL and physician-generated contours through the Dice similarity coefficients (DSC), the Hausdorff distances, and the distances of the center-of-mass.RESULTS: The average DSCs between DUL-based prostate contours and reference contours for test data in Group one and Group two-consensus were 0.83 ± 0.04, and 0.85 ± 0.04, respectively. Correspondingly, the mean center-of-mass distances were 3.52 mm ± 1.15 mm, and 2.98 mm ± 1.42 mm, respectively.CONCLUSIONS: This novel DUL technique can automatically propagate the contour of the prostate from pCT to CBCT. The proposed method shows that highly accurate contour propagation for CBCT-guided adaptive radiotherapy is achievable via the deep learning technique.

View details for DOI 10.1002/mp.14755

View details for PubMedID 33544390