Catheter autoreconstruction in computed tomography based brachytherapy treatment planning

The aim of this study is to develop an automatic reconstruction of brachyth erapy catheters using CT (computed tomography) data. Previously no such aut omatic facility has existed in any treatment planning software. To achieve this facility we have developed tools for the automatic reconstruction (whi ch we term autoreconstruction) of plastic and metallic catheters. These alg orithms overcome a number of difficulties which arise when a large number o f catheters are present. These include situations with intersecting cathete rs and with loop techniques. The time required for the catheter reconstruct ion process using our autoreconstruction method is significantly reduced. T he accuracy of our autoreconstruction is at least as high as the classical manual slice-by-slice method. (C) 2000 American Association of Physicists i n Medicine. [S0094-2405(00)01205-0].