Prospective quantitative quality assurance and deformation estimation of MRI-CT image registration in simulation of head and neck radiotherapy patients

摘要

BackgroundMRI-guided radiotherapy planning (MRIgRT) may be superior to CT-guided planning in some instances owing to its improved soft tissue contrast. However, MR images do not communicate tissue electron density information necessary for dose calculation and therefore must either be co-registered to CT or algorithmically converted to synthetic CT. No robust quality assessment of commercially available MR-CT registration algorithms is yet available; thus we sought to quantify MR-CT registration formally.