| The importance of knowing the patient actual position is essential for intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). This procedure uses tightened margin and escalated tumor dose. In order to eliminate the uncertainty of the geometry in IMRT, daily imaging is prefered. The imaging dose, limited field of view and the imaging concurrency of the MVCT (mega-voltage computerized tomography) are investigated in this work. By applying partial volume imaging (PVI), imaging dose can be reduced for a region of interest (ROI) imaging. The imaging dose and the image quality are quantitatively balanced with inverse imaging dose planning. With PVI, 72% average imaging dose reduction was observed on a typical prostate patient case. The algebraic reconstruction technique (ART) based projection onto convex sets (POCS) shows higher robustness than filtered back projection when available imaging data is not complete and continuous. However, when the projection is continuous as in the actual delivery, a non-iterative wavelet based multiresolution local tomography (WMLT) is able to achieve 1% accuracy within the ROI. The reduction of imaging dose is dependent on the size of ROI. The improvement of concurrency is also discussed based on the combination of PVI and WMLT. Useful target images were acquired with treatment beams and the temporal resolution can be increased to 20 seconds in tomotherapy. The data truncation problem with the portal imager was also studied. Results show that the image quality is not adversely affected by truncation when WMLT is employed.; When the online imaging is available, a perturbation dose calculation (PDC) that estimates the actual delivered dose is proposed. Corrected from the Fano's theorem, PDC counts the first order term in the density variation to calculate the internal and external anatomy change. Although change in the dose distribution that is caused by the internal organ motion is less than 1% for 6 MV beams, the external anatomy change has substantial impact on the dose distribution. A 5% change in the dose volume histogram is observed in phantom study. The influence of the external contour change on dose distribution can be calculated by PDC within 10 seconds. |
