Real-time Cherenkov emission portal imaging during CyberKnife® radiotherapy.

The feasibility of real-time portal imaging during radiation therapy, through the Cherenkov emission (CE) effect is investigated via a medical linear accelerator (CyberKnife(®)) irradiating a partially-filled water tank with a 60 mm circular beam. A graticule of lead/plywood and a number of tissue equivalent materials were alternatively placed at the beam entrance face while the induced CE at the exit face was imaged using a gated electron-multiplying-intensified-charged-coupled device (emICCD) for both stationary and dynamic scenarios. This was replicated on an Elekta Synergy(®) linear accelerator with portal images acquired using the iViewGT(™) system. Profiles across the acquired portal images were analysed to reveal the potential resolution and contrast limits of this novel CE based portal imaging technique and compared against the current standard. The CE resolution study revealed that using the lead/plywood graticule, separations down to 3.4 ± 0.5 mm can be resolved. A 28 mm thick tissue-equivalent rod with electron density of 1.69 relative to water demonstrated a CE contrast of 15% through air and 14% through water sections, as compared to a corresponding contrast of 19% and 12% using the iViewGT(™) system. For dynamic scenarios, video rate imaging with 30 frames per second was achieved. It is demonstrated that CE-based portal imaging is feasible to identify both stationary and dynamic objects within a CyberKnife(®) radiotherapy treatment field.

Accounting for filter bandwidth improves the quantitative accuracy of bioluminescence tomography.

Bioluminescence imaging is a noninvasive technique whereby surface weighted images of luminescent probes within animals are used to characterize cell count and function. Traditionally, data are collected over the entire emission spectrum of the source using no filters and are used to evaluate cell count/function over the entire spectrum. Alternatively, multispectral data over several wavelengths can be incorporated to perform tomographic reconstruction of source location and intensity. However, bandpass filters used for multispectral data acquisition have a specific bandwidth, which is ignored in the reconstruction. In this work, ignoring the bandwidth is shown to introduce a dependence of the recovered source intensity on the bandwidth of the filters. A method of accounting for the bandwidth of filters used during multispectral data acquisition is presented and its efficacy in increasing the quantitative accuracy of bioluminescence tomography is demonstrated through simulation and experiment. It is demonstrated that while using filters with a large bandwidth can dramatically decrease the data acquisition time, if not accounted for, errors of up to 200% in quantitative accuracy are introduced in two-dimensional planar imaging, even after normalization. For tomographic imaging, the use of this method to account for filter bandwidth dramatically improves the quantitative accuracy.