Biomechanical modeling of neck flexion for deformable alignment of the salivary glands in head and neck cancer images

摘要

During head and neck (HN) cancer radiation therapy, analysis of the dose-response relationship for the parotid glands (PG) relies on the ability to accurately align soft tissue organs between longitudinal images. In order to isolate the response of the salivary glands to delivered dose, from deformation due to patient position, it is important to resolve the patient postural changes, mainly due to neck flexion. In this study we evaluate the use of a biomechanical model-based deformable image registration (DIR) algorithm to estimate the displacements and deformations of the salivary glands due to postural changes.