Early Detection of Lymph Node Metastasis Using Primary Head and Neck Cancer Computed Tomography and Fluorescence Lifetime Imaging.

: Early detection and accurate diagnosis of lymph node metastasis (LNM) in head and neck cancer (HNC) are crucial for enhancing patient prognosis and survival rates. Current imaging methods have limitations, necessitating new evaluation of new diagnostic techniques. This study investigates the potential of combining pre-operative CT and intra-operative fluorescence lifetime imaging (FLIm) to enhance LNM prediction in HNC using primary tumor signatures.

Head and neck synthetic CT generated from ultra-low-dose cone-beam CT following Image Gently Protocol using deep neural network.

Purpose: Image guidance is used to improve the accuracy of radiation therapy delivery but results in increased dose to patients. This is of particular concern in children who need be treated per Pediatric Image Gently Protocols due to long-term risks from radiation exposure. The purpose of this study is to design a deep neural network architecture and loss function for improving soft-tissue contrast and preserving small anatomical features in ultra-low-dose cone-beam CTs (CBCT) of head and neck cancer (HNC) imaging.

Clinical Enhancement in AI-Based Post-processed Fast-Scan Low-Dose CBCT for Head and Neck Adaptive Radiotherapy.

To assess image quality and uncertainty in organ-at-risk segmentation on cone beam computed tomography (CBCT) enhanced by deep-learning convolutional neural network (DCNN) for head and neck cancer. An in-house DCNN was trained using forty post-operative head and neck cancer patients with their planning CT and first-fraction CBCT images. Additional fifteen patients with repeat simulation CT (rCT) and CBCT scan taken on the same day (oCBCT) were used for validation and clinical utility assessment.

Half2Half: deep neural network based CT image denoising without independent reference data.

Reducing radiation dose of x-ray computed tomography (CT) and thereby decreasing the potential risk to patients are desirable in CT imaging. Deep neural network (DNN) has been proposed to reduce noise in low-dose CT (LdCT) images and showed promising results. However, most existing DNN-based methods require training a neural network using high-quality CT images as the reference.

Convolutional neural network enhancement of fast-scan low-dose cone-beam CT images for head and neck radiotherapy.

To improve image quality and CT number accuracy of fast-scan low-dose cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) through a deep-learning convolutional neural network (CNN) methodology for head-and-neck (HN) radiotherapy. Fifty-five paired CBCT and CT images from HN patients were retrospectively analysed. Among them, 15 patients underwent adaptive replanning during treatment, thus had same-day CT/CBCT pairs.