Intrafraction motion tracking for MR-Linac prostate radiotherapy

Field: Medicine (Health Sciences)

With the clinical introduction of linear accelerators combined with magnetic resonance imaging, such as the 1.5T MR-Linac, new opportunities to further improve radiotherapy treatments arrived. The fact that fast 3D imaging of the patient can be acquired during treatment, allows to explore opportunities to track tumor and organ at risk motion during treatment. Nowadays, the use of hypofractionated radiotherapy treatments for prostate cancer has become more common. To proceed with such ultra-hypofractionated schemes, intrafraction motion monitoring is required. \n \nThe results described in this thesis study showed that it is possible to determine prostate intrafraction motion using 3D cine-MR imaging using implanted fiducial markers and these results were used as input for ground-truth validation in the development of a soft-tissue based tracking algorithm. Analysis and comparison of the soft-tissue results compared to the previously obtained fiducial marker based results showed that the soft-tissue based method outperforms the fiducial marker based method in terms of robustness and rotation accuracy. \n \nUsing the soft-tissue based tracking method, the intrafraction motion of the first five prostate cancer patients treated on the 1.5T MR-Linac was then determined. Using this study, we showed that high quality 3D cine-MR imaging and prostate tracking during MR-guided radiotherapy is feasible with beam-on. \n \nThe obtained intrafraction motion was then used to determine the impact of the prostate intrafraction motion on the delivered dose distribution for the first five prostate cancer patients treated on the 1.5T MR-Linac. The pipeline presented in this thesis demonstrated the first MR-Linac dose reconstruction results based on prostate intrafraction tracking using 3D cine-MR imaging and treatment log files. \n \nWhen considering hypofractionated treatment for high-risk prostate cancer patients, intrafraction motion of the seminal vesicles must be taken into account. To our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate six dimensions of freedom seminal vesicle intrafraction motion from 3D cine-MR during actual MR-guided treatments. Results showed that especially seminal vesicle intrafraction rotation motion is significantly larger than found for the prostate. \n \nMoreover, this thesis described a study which investigated the efficacy of always applying a subsequent adapt to position (ATP) procedure to counter the prostate intrafraction motion that occurred during the adapt to shape (ATS) procedure for prostate cancer patients treated on the 1.5T MR-Linac. It was found that due to the continuous and stochastical nature of prostate intrafraction motion, margin reduction below 4 mm require fast intrafraction plan adaptation methods. \n \nThe work described in this thesis contains analyses determining the influence of intrafraction motion on the dose distribution for patients, coverage probability analyses for the prostate and seminal vesicles and investigated the efficacy of using ATP procedures to reduce the effect of intrafraction motion. In essence, this thesis describes methods to determine intrafraction motion and its influence thereof in the setting of MR-guided radiotherapy for prostate cancer patients. The gained knowledge may be used to reduce radiotherapy margins for hypofractionated prostate radiotherapy and the described methods may be used as input for the introduction of fast plan adaptation methods for MR-guided radiotherapy on the 1.5T MR-Linac.