Automatic Definition of Planning Target Volume in Computer-Assisted Radiotherapy

This paper describes a supporting tool for medical doctors, providing the automatic definition of radiation volumes (planning target volume, PTV) for conformal radiotherapy computed on detected tumor areas (gross tumor volume, GTV) within radiographic images. First, the recognized brain tumor is geometrically reconstructed and visualized in three-dimensional space. Then, the respective growth dynamics are described by a classical diffusion-reaction equation. An artificial neural network has been used in order to predict the radiation volume according to the detected tumor areas and to the expected growth dynamics. The proposed method extends a former polinomial approach, using some B-splines whose coefficients are defined by an artificial neural