Adaptive Radiation Therapy for Head and Neck Cancer—Can an Old Goal Evolve into a New Standard?
Figure 7
The ART process for patient treatment starts with a rigid alignment (in this example, to the C2 vertebra) between the reference planning CT and the daily in-room CT ((a) and (b)). The planning contours are overlaid to the daily CT to verify setup accuracy and to evaluate if there are changes in current anatomy relative to baseline. If the changes are significant, as illustrated in (b), a deformable image registration can be performed to propagate original planning contours onto current anatomy. The resultant contours are shown on (c). This process takes less than 30 seconds.
