Tissue motion tracking at the edges of a radiation treatment field using local optical flow analysis

This paper investigates the feasibility and accuracy of tracking the motion of an intruding organ-at-risk (OAR) at the edges of a treatment field using a local optical flow analysis of electronic portal images. An intruding OAR was simulated by modifying the portal images obtained by irradiating a programmable phantom's lung tumour. A rectangular treatment aperture was assumed and the edges of the beam's eye view (BEV) were partitioned into clusters/grids according to the width of the multi-leaf collimators (MLC). The optical flow velocities were calculated and the motion accuracy in these clusters was analysed. A velocity error of 0.4 ± 1.4 mm/s with a linearity of 1.04 for tracking an object intruding at 10mm/s (max) was obtained.