AI to Improve Proton Beam Therapy Delivery in Children with Cancer | Spring Into STEM скачать в хорошем качестве

AI to Improve Proton Beam Therapy Delivery in Children with Cancer | Spring Into STEM

At UCL, we understand how science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) are fundamental to the way we live our lives and shape so many of the things that we see and do every day. Proton Beam Therapy (PBT) is a form of cancer treatment that recently has become available in the UK. Compared to the conventional radiotherapy, PBT is highly targeted, so reduces the risk of radiation damage. That makes it particularly favourable to children, who are very radiosensitive and commonly develop radiation-induced side effects of treatment later in their life. Abdominal structures in children are affected by significant gas filling fluctuation. That might result in treatment plan deviations. The treatment plan accuracy is important and requires monitoring to ensure safe and successful treatment. That can be achieved by improving quality of Cone Beam Computed Tomography (CBCT) images acquired on-the-day of treatment, generating synthetic Computed Tomography (synCT) images. These synCT images can be used for the treatment plan evaluation. In our methodology we adopted an AI cycle consistency Generative Adversarial Network. We tailored the original framework to address challenges in paediatric application. The proposed method resulted in improved quality on consistency of the synCT. Visual improvements were confirmed by numerical evaluation conducted in a 5-fold cross validation manner measuring differences in Hounsfield Units. The proposed method also achieved better results than its counterparts on an unseen testing dataset. Our AI-based method improves the quality of CBCTs, while preserving their anatomical structures. That potentially allows for Proton Beam Therapy plan verification and its immediate adaptation, to ensure successful treatment. Find out more about us - search 'UCL Engineering', or visit https://www.ucl.ac.uk/engineering/