A transformer-based dual-domain network for reconstructing FOV extended cone-beam CT images from truncated sinograms in radiation therapy

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) is widely used in clinical radiotherapy, but its small field of view (sFOV) limits its application potential. In this study, a transformer-based dual-domain network (dual_swin), which combined image domain restoration and sinogram domain restoration, was proposed for the reconstruction of complete CBCT images with extended FOV from truncated sinograms. METHODS: The planning CT images with large FOV (LFOV) of 330 patients who received radiation therapy were collected. The synthetic CBCT (sCBCT) images with LFOV were generated from CT images by the trained cycleGAN network, and CBCT images with sFOV were obtained through forward projection, projection truncation, and filtered back projection (FBP), comprising the training and test data. The proposed dual_swin includes sinogram domain restoration, image domain restoration, and FBP layer, and the swin transformer blocks were used as the basic feature extraction module in the network to improve the global feature extraction ability. The proposed dual_swin was compared with the image domain method, the sinogram domain method, the U-Net based dual domain network (dual_Unet), and the traditional iterative reconstruction method based on prior image and conjugate gradient least-squares (CGLS) in the test of sCBCT images and clinical CBCT images. The HU accuracy and body contour accuracy of the predicted images by each method were evaluated. RESULTS: The images generated using the CGLS method were fuzzy and obtained the lowest structural similarity (SSIM) among all methods in the test of sCBCT and clinical CBCT images. The predicted images by the image domain methods are quite different from the ground truth and have low accuracy on HU value and body contour. In comparison with image domain methods, sinogram domain methods improved the accuracy of HU value and body contour but introduced secondary artifacts and distorted bone tissue. The proposed dual_swin achieved the highest HU and contour accuracy with mean absolute error (MAE) of 23.0 HU, SSIM of 95.7%, dice similarity coefficient (DSC) of 99.6%, and Hausdorff distance (HD) of 4.1 mm in the test of sCBCT images. In the test of clinical patients, images that were predicted by dual_swin yielded MAE, SSIM, DSC, and HD of 38.2 HU, 91.7%, 99.0%, and 5.4 mm, respectively. The predicted images by the proposed dual_swin has significantly higher accuracy than the other methods (P < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: The proposed dual_swin can accurately reconstruct FOV extended CBCT images from the truncated sinogram to improve the application potential of CBCT images in radiotherapy.