Title
Towards a comprehensive CT image segmentation for thoracic organ radiation dose estimation and reporting
Abstract
Administered dose of ionizing radiation during medical imaging is an issue of increasing concern for the patient, for the clinical community, and for respective regulatory bodies. CT radiation dose is currently estimated based on a set of very simplifying assumptions which do not take the actual body geometry and organ specific doses into account. This makes it very difficult to accurately report imaging related administered dose and to track it for different organs over the life of the patient. In this paper this deficit is addressed in a two-fold way. In a first step, the absorbed radiation dose in each image voxel is estimated based on a Monte-Carlo simulation of X-ray absorption and scattering. In a second step, the image is segmented into tissue types with different radio sensitivity. In combination this allows to calculate the effective dose as a weighted sum of the individual organ doses. The main purpose of this paper is to assess the feasibility of automatic organ specific dose estimation. With respect to a commercially applicable solution and respective robustness and efficiency requirements, we investigated the effect of dose sampling rather than integration over the organ volume. We focused on the thoracic anatomy as the exemplary body region, imaged frequently by CT. For image segmentation we applied a set of available approaches which allowed us to cover the main thoracic radio-sensitive tissue types. We applied the dose estimation approach to 10 thoracic CT datasets and evaluated segmentation accuracy and administered dose and could show that organ specific dose estimation can be achieved.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1117/12.2042998
Proceedings of SPIE
Keywords
Field
DocType
CT,radiation dose,ionizing radiation,organ segmentation
Voxel,Biomedical engineering,Medical imaging,Image segmentation,Robustness (computer science),Artificial intelligence,Effective dose (radiation),Computer vision,Segmentation,Absorbed Radiation Dose,Medical physics,Ionizing radiation,Physics
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
9034
0277-786X
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
8
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lorenz Cristian1893100.01
Heike Ruppertshofen2356.59
Vik, T.332.17
peter prinsen400.34
Jens Wiegert572.45