Respiratory volume prediction for pediatric TIS patients with MAGEC rod treatment from pre-operative dynamic MRI and chest radiographs

Pre- and post-treatment evaluation for treatment of spinal deformity with MAGEC rods is crucial, particularly for assessing respiratory volumes. However, presence of MAGEC rods precludes MRI scanning. Therefore, finding a method to measure regional respiratory volumes in such patients is essential for optimized clinical care. We introduce a novel method using pre-operative dMRI and pre- and post-operative CXR to predict post-operative lung volumes via a neural network. With a dataset of 49 pediatric patients with thoracic insufficiency syndrome, we demonstrated feasibility of predicting post-operative lung volumes with ~10% relative percentage error. Future studies with more datasets can achieve better results.