Abstract
Brachytherapy is a treatment option for gynecological cancer that involves the insertion of small radioactive sources inside or near the tumor. It reduces the side effects of radiation therapy since the irradiation to a healthy portion of the patient is limited compared to the external beam radiation. Although CT-guided placement in brachytherapy has advanced, acquiring sources or applicator’s positioning within a limited timeframe still requires time and experience. There are commercially available procedural templates to support the insertion of radioactive sources, and some research manually designed patient-specific templates. This paper proposes a method to automatically design the patient-specific template based on the patient’s body shape and tumor morphology obtained from magnetic resonance images. The experiments on three subjects showed that the proposed method successfully designed the procedural template in all cases.
