Few-view and limited-angle cone-beam megavoltage CT for breast localization in radiation therapy

In radiation therapy for breast cancer treatment, information about the external (skin) and internal (lung) boundaries is highly useful for determining the relative locations of the target and lung. In this work, we investigate the feasibility of tomographic reconstruction from few-view and limited-angle cone-beam projections acquired in radiation therapy unit for obtaining critical boundary information. From the few-view and limited-angle projections acquired directly in the treatment machine with an amorphous silicon electronic portal imaging device (EPID), We compared and evaluated the performance of the conventional cone-beam FDK algorithm and an iterative algorithm based upon the maximum-likelihood method for transmission tomography (ML-TR). Preliminary results demonstrated that the ML-TR algorithm is more promising than is the cone-beam FDK algorithm. Useful boundary information for breast localization can be obtained with very few projections in a limited angle range from the reconstruction of ML-TR algorithm.