Cone-beam CT using a mobile C-arm: a registration solution for IGRT with an optical tracking system

A method for registering images acquired from a prototype flat panel mobile C-arm, capable of kilovoltage (kV) cone-beam computed tomography (CT), to a linear accelerator ( LINAC) isocenter is presented. A calibration procedure is performed which involves locating reflective markers placed on the C-arm and a phantom in two coordinate systems. A commercial optical tracking system locates the markers relative to the LINAC isocenter ( room coordinates). The cone-beam imaging capabilities of the C-arm provide the location of the markers on the calibration phantom in image coordinates. A singular value decomposition ( SVD) algorithm is used to determine the relationship between the C-arm, image coordinates and room coordinates. Once the calibration is completed, the position of the C-arm at any arbitrary location is accurately determined from the tracking system. A final transformation is calculated capable of mapping voxels in the reconstructed image set to their corresponding position in room coordinates. An evaluation to determine the accuracy of this method was performed by locating markers on a phantom. The position of the phantom markers in room coordinates was obtained directly using the optical tracking system and compared with that using the described method above. A mean absolute distance of 1.4 +/- 0.5 was observed for a completely transformed image set. This is comparable to that of systems routinely used for image-guided radiation therapy (IGRT).