![]() Much effort was made to automatically segment OARs for human radiation treatment planning. The manual delineation of the OARs before plan delivery is one of the most time consuming tasks, especially due to the high number of axial slices resulting from the submillimetric voxel sizes used in pre-clinical ♜BCT imaging. In the treatment planning system, the time consuming manual contouring of the OARs, often performed by biologists and not delineation experts, could be replaced by automatic OAR contouring, while simultaneously other (blue) steps such as the ♜BCT to material conversion, the manual tumor delineation, the dose calculation, and the plan optimization are performed. OAR, organ at risk ♜BCT, microcone beam CT. Pre-clinical small animal image-guided precision irradiation workflow. 4 All these workflow steps should not require more than 20–60 min, for reasons of animal wellbeing and workflow efficiency. Potentially also other forms of imaging, such as bioluminescence photon imaging, may be performed while the animal is under anesthesia. In the final step of the planning workflow, the irradiation treatment is optimized the dose calculation of the irradiation plan is performed and evaluated quantitatively considering the dose volume histogram parameters. ![]() the tumor) and the organs at risk (OARs). In these treatment planning systems, 2 such as SmART-ATP 3 (Precision X-ray Inc., North Branford, CT), an interactive tissue segmentation is performed based on a CT number histogram, and is followed by a time consuming manual delineation of both the target ( e.g. After finishing the ♜BCT image reconstruction, the images are loaded in a dedicated pre-clinical treatment planning system to design a quantitative treatment plan to deliver, following the pre-clinical irradiation workflow. In the first steps of this pre-clinical workflow, the animal is anesthetized and imaged using the onboard microcone beam CT (♜BCT) scanner, which is frequently implemented in these irradiators. A modern pre-clinical small animal irradiation workflow, using image-guided precision irradiation cabinets, consists of several steps 1 ( Figure 1) that must fit into a tight time schedule, since the animal is physically constrained under deep anesthesia.
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