RT-SRTS: Angle-Agnostic Real-Time Simultaneous 3D Reconstruction and Tumor Segmentation from Single X-Ray Projection
This addresses motion control in radiotherapy by enabling angle-agnostic, real-time imaging and segmentation, though it is incremental as it builds on existing single-projection 3D imaging with added segmentation.
The study tackled the problem of real-time 3D reconstruction and tumor segmentation from single X-ray projections for radiotherapy, achieving simultaneous processing in approximately 70 ms with superior results compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Radiotherapy is one of the primary treatment methods for tumors, but the organ movement caused by respiration limits its accuracy. Recently, 3D imaging from a single X-ray projection has received extensive attention as a promising approach to address this issue. However, current methods can only reconstruct 3D images without directly locating the tumor and are only validated for fixed-angle imaging, which fails to fully meet the requirements of motion control in radiotherapy. In this study, a novel imaging method RT-SRTS is proposed which integrates 3D imaging and tumor segmentation into one network based on multi-task learning (MTL) and achieves real-time simultaneous 3D reconstruction and tumor segmentation from a single X-ray projection at any angle. Furthermore, the attention enhanced calibrator (AEC) and uncertain-region elaboration (URE) modules have been proposed to aid feature extraction and improve segmentation accuracy. The proposed method was evaluated on fifteen patient cases and compared with three state-of-the-art methods. It not only delivers superior 3D reconstruction but also demonstrates commendable tumor segmentation results. Simultaneous reconstruction and segmentation can be completed in approximately 70 ms, significantly faster than the required time threshold for real-time tumor tracking. The efficacies of both AEC and URE have also been validated in ablation studies. The code of work is available at https://github.com/ZywooSimple/RT-SRTS.