The purpose of this paper is to develop a patient-specific finite element model (FEM) to calculate the pulmonary function of lung cancer patients for evaluation of radiation treatment. The lung model was created with an in-house developed FEM software with region-specific parameters derived from a four-dimensional CT (4DCT) image. The model was used first to calculate changes in air volume and elastic stress in the lung, and then to calculate regional compliance defined as the change in air volume corrected by its associated stress. The results have shown that the resultant compliance images can reveal the regional elastic property of lung tissue, and could be useful for radiation treatment planning and assessment.

Date Published: 8 July 2011
PDF: 5 pages
Proc. SPIE 8009, Third International Conference on Digital Image Processing (ICDIP 2011), 80090H (8 July 2011); doi: 10.1117/12.896069

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8009:
Third International Conference on Digital Image Processing (ICDIP 2011)
Ting Zhang, Editor(s)