Automatic tumour volume delineation in respiratory-gated PET images

Abstract

Introduction: Positron emission tomography (PET) is a state-of-the-art functional imaging technique used in the accurate detection of cancer. The main problem with the tumours present in the lungs is that they are non-stationary during each respiratory cycle. Tumours in the lungs can get displaced up to 2.5 cm during respiration. Accurate detection of the tumour enables avoiding the addition of extra margin around the tumour that is usually used during radiotherapy treatment planning. Methods: This paper presents a novel method to detect and track tumour in respiratory-gated PET images. The approach followed to achieve this task is to automatically delineate the tumour from the first frame u..