August 13, 2013 — Mirada Medical Deformable Image Registration software is the highlight of multiple scientific studies. The studies further validate the importance of deformable registration in radiotherapy planning, as well as Mirada Medical’s focus on improving the quality of radiation treatment and saving time.
Atlas based auto-contouring is the focus of the first paper, entitled “Assessment of Contour Fusion Method for Auto-Contouring of the Head and Neck CT Images,” by Drs. Aymeric Larrue, Timor Kadir and Mark Gooding. The study investigates how the use of multiple atlases can improve the quality of the auto-contouring results and compares two multi-atlas contouring methods, simultaneous truth and performance level estimation (STAPLE) and Majority Voting, to a single fixed atlas method. STAPLE was found to be the best method followed closely by Majority Voting.
Another study, entitled “Pitfalls in Dose-Volume Histogram Computations,” by Drs. Frederik Kaster, Marianne Aznar and Timor Kadir, performed in collaboration with Rigshospitalet, University of Copenhagen, investigates the issues around calculating Dose Volume Histograms (DVHs), an important tool in assessing treatment plans. Different implementations for calculating DVHs can cause significant variations in the DVHs produced and this can become a source of error in clinical decision making and multi-center trials. The study found that the most important sources of variation are the resolution of the dose grid, whether to calculate on the computed tomography (CT) or dose grid and the method of voxel counting – e.g. whole voxel, partial voxel weighting.
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