Improved dosimetry for targeted radionuclide therapy using nonrigid registration on sequential SPECT images

Purpose: Voxel-level and patient-specific 3D dosimetry for targeted radionuclide therapy (TRT) typically involves serial nuclear medicine scans. Misalignment of the images can result in reduced dosimetric accuracy. Since the scans are typically performed over a period of several days, there will be patient movement between scans and possible nonrigid organ deformation. This work aims to implement and evaluate the use of nonrigid image registration on a series of quantitative SPECT (QSPECT) images for TRT dosimetry. Methods: A population of 4D extended cardiac torso phantoms, comprised of three In-111 Zevalin biokinetics models and three anatomical variations, was generated based on the patient data. The authors simulated QSPECT acquisitions at five time points. At each time point, individual organ and whole-body deformation between scans were modeled by translating/rotating organs and the body up to 5?/voxels, keeping ≤5% difference in organ volume. An analytical projector was used to generate realistic noisy projections for a medium energy general purpose collimator. Projections were reconstructed using OS-EM algorithm with geometric collimator detector response, attenuation, and scatter corrections. The QSPECT images were registered using organ-based nonrigid image registration method. The cumulative activity in each voxel was obtained by integrating the activity over time. Dose distribution images were obtained by convolving the cumulative activity images with a Y-90 dose kernel. Dose volume histograms (DVHs) for organs-of-interest were analyzed. Results: After nonrigid registration, the mean differences in organ doses compared to the case without misalignment were improved from (?15.50±5.59)% to (?2.12±1.05)% and (?7.28±2.30)% to (?0.23±0.71)% for the spleen and liver, respectively. For all organs, the cumulative DVHs showed improvement after nonrigid registration and the normalized absolute error of differential DVHs ranged from 6.79% to 22.70% for liver and 26.00% to 39.70% for spleen with different segmentation methods. Conclusions: These results demonstrated that nonrigid registration of sequential QSPECT images is feasible for TRT and improves the accuracy of 3D dosimetry.