Non‐orthogonal kV imaging guided patient position verification in non‐coplanar radiation therapy with dataset‐free implicit neural representation

Abstract Background Cone‐beam CT (CBCT) is crucial for patient alignment and target verification in radiation therapy (RT). However, for non‐coplanar beams, potential collisions between the treatment couch and the on‐board imaging system limit the range that the gantry can be rotated. Limited‐angle measurements are often insufficient to generate high‐quality volumetric images for image‐domain registration, therefore limiting the use of CBCT for position verification. An alternative to image‐domain registration is to use a few 2D projections acquired by the onboard kV imager to register with the 3D planning CT for patient position verification, which is referred to as 2D–3D registration. Purpose The 2D–3D registration involves converting the 3D volume into a set of digitally reconstructed radiographs (DRRs) expected to be comparable to the acquired 2D projections. The domain gap between the generated DRRs and the acquired projections can happen due to the inaccurate geometry modeling in DRR generation and artifacts in the actual acquisitions. We aim to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the challenging 2D–3D registration problem in non‐coplanar RT with limited‐angle CBCT scans. Method We designed an accelerated, dataset‐free, and patient‐specific 2D‐3D registration framework based on an implicit neural representation (INR) network and a composite similarity measure. The INR network consists of a lightweight three‐layer multilayer perception followed by average pooling to calculate rigid motion parameters, which are used to transform the original 3D volume to the moving position. The Radon transform and imaging specifications at the moving position are used to generate DRRs with higher accuracy. We designed a composite similarity measure consisting of pixel‐wise intensity difference and gradient differences between the generated DRRs and acquired projections to further reduce the impact of their domain gap on registration accuracy. We evaluated the proposed method on both simulation data and real phantom data acquired from a Varian TrueBeam machine. Comparisons with a conventional non‐deep‐learning registration approach and ablation studies on the composite similarity measure were conducted to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method. Results In the simulation data experiments, two X‐ray projections of a head‐and‐neck image with discrepancy were used for the registration. The accuracy of the registration results was evaluated on experiments set up at four different moving positions with ground‐truth moving parameters. The proposed method achieved sub‐millimeter accuracy in translations and sub‐degree accuracy in rotations. In the phantom experiments, a head‐and‐neck phantom was scanned at three different positions involving couch translations and rotations. We achieved translation errors of and subdegree accuracy for pitch and roll. Experiments on registration using different numbers of projections with varying angle discrepancies demonstrate the improved accuracy and robustness of the proposed method, compared to both the conventional registration approach and the proposed approach without certain components of the composite similarity measure. Conclusion We proposed a dataset‐free lightweight INR‐based registration with a composite similarity measure for the challenging 2D–3D registration problem with limited‐angle CBCT scans. Comprehensive evaluations of both simulation data and experimental phantom data demonstrated the efficiency, accuracy, and robustness of the proposed method.