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Analysis and optimization of the robot setup for robotic-ultrasound-guided radiation therapy

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International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Purpose

Robotic ultrasound promises continuous, volumetric, and non-ionizing tracking of organ motion during radiation therapy. However, placement of the robot is critical because it is radio-opaque and might severely influence the achievable dose distribution.

Methods

We propose two heuristic optimization strategies for automatic placement of an ultrasound robot around a patient. Considering a kinematically redundant robot arm, we compare a generic approach based on stochastic search and a more problem-specific segmentwise construction approach. The former allows for multiple elbow configurations while the latter is deterministic. Additionally, we study different objective functions guiding the search. Our evaluation is based on data for ten actual prostate cancer cases and we compare the resulting plan quality for both methods to manually chosen robot configurations previously proposed.

Results

The mean improvements in the treatment planning objective value with respect to the best manually selected robot position and a single elbow configuration range from 8.2 to 32.8% and 8.5 to 15.5% for segmentwise construction and stochastic search, respectively. Considering three different elbow configurations, the stochastic search results in better objective values in 80% of the cases, with 30% being significantly better. The optimization strategies are robust with respect to beam sampling and transducer orientation and using previous optimization results as starting point for stochastic search typically results in better solutions compared to random starting points.

Conclusion

We propose a robust and generic optimization scheme, which can be used to optimize the robot placement for robotic ultrasound guidance in radiation therapy. The automatic optimization further mitigates the impact of robotic ultrasound on the treatment plan quality.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partially funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Grant SCHL 1844/3-1).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Medical Technology, Hamburg University of Technology, Hamburg, Germany

    Matthias Schlüter, Stefan Gerlach & Alexander Schlaefer

  2. Europäisches Cyberknife Zentrum München-Großhadern, Munich, Germany

    Christoph Fürweger

  3. Center for Neurosurgery, Department of Stereotaxy and Functional Neurosurgery, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany

    Christoph Fürweger

Authors
  1. Matthias Schlüter
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  2. Stefan Gerlach
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  3. Christoph Fürweger
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  4. Alexander Schlaefer
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Correspondence to Matthias Schlüter.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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This article is based on fully anonymized treatment planning data and does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

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Schlüter, M., Gerlach, S., Fürweger, C. et al. Analysis and optimization of the robot setup for robotic-ultrasound-guided radiation therapy. Int J CARS 14, 1379–1387 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-019-02009-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-019-02009-w

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