Real-Time Non-Rigid 3D Respiratory Motion Estimation for MR-Guided Radiotherapy Using MR-MOTUS

IEEE Trans Med Imaging. 2022 Feb;41(2):332-346. doi: 10.1109/TMI.2021.3112818. Epub 2022 Feb 2.

Abstract

The MR-Linac is a combination of an MR-scanner and radiotherapy linear accelerator (Linac) which holds the promise to increase the precision of radiotherapy treatments with MR-guided radiotherapy by monitoring motion during radiotherapy with MRI, and adjusting the radiotherapy plan accordingly. Optimal MR-guidance for respiratory motion during radiotherapy requires MR-based 3D motion estimation with a latency of 200-500 ms. Currently this is still challenging since typical methods rely on MR-images, and are therefore limited by the 3D MR-imaging latency. In this work, we present a method to perform non-rigid 3D respiratory motion estimation with 170 ms latency, including both acquisition and reconstruction. The proposed method called real-time low-rank MR-MOTUS reconstructs motion-fields directly from k -space data, and leverages an explicit low-rank decomposition of motion-fields to split the large scale 3D+t motion-field reconstruction problem posed in our previous work into two parts: (I) a medium-scale offline preparation phase and (II) a small-scale online inference phase which exploits the results of the offline phase for real-time computations. The method was validated on free-breathing data of five volunteers, acquired with a 1.5T Elekta Unity MR-Linac. Results show that the reconstructed 3D motion-field are anatomically plausible, highly correlated with a self-navigation motion surrogate ( R=0.975 ±0.0110 ), and can be reconstructed with a total latency of 170 ms that is sufficient for real-time MR-guided abdominal radiotherapy.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Humans
  • Imaging, Three-Dimensional
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging* / methods
  • Motion
  • Particle Accelerators
  • Radiotherapy, Image-Guided* / methods
  • Respiration