End-to-end Deformable Attention Graph Neural Network for Single-view Liver Mesh Reconstruction
This enables real-time 3D tracking for cancer radiotherapy, addressing a domain-specific bottleneck in medical imaging.
The paper tackles the problem of 3D liver mesh reconstruction from a single 2D MRI slice for radiotherapy guidance, achieving an average error of 3.06 ± 0.7 mm and a Chamfer distance of 63.14 ± 27.28.
Intensity modulated radiotherapy (IMRT) is one of the most common modalities for treating cancer patients. One of the biggest challenges is precise treatment delivery that accounts for varying motion patterns originating from free-breathing. Currently, image-guided solutions for IMRT is limited to 2D guidance due to the complexity of 3D tracking solutions. We propose a novel end-to-end attention graph neural network model that generates in real-time a triangular shape of the liver based on a reference segmentation obtained at the preoperative phase and a 2D MRI coronal slice taken during the treatment. Graph neural networks work directly with graph data and can capture hidden patterns in non-Euclidean domains. Furthermore, contrary to existing methods, it produces the shape entirely in a mesh structure and correctly infers mesh shape and position based on a surrogate image. We define two on-the-fly approaches to make the correspondence of liver mesh vertices with 2D images obtained during treatment. Furthermore, we introduce a novel task-specific identity loss to constrain the deformation of the liver in the graph neural network to limit phenomenons such as flying vertices or mesh holes. The proposed method achieves results with an average error of 3.06 +- 0.7 mm and Chamfer distance with L2 norm of 63.14 +- 27.28.