Improvement of the cine-CT based 4D-CT imaging.

An improved 4D-CT utility has been developed on the GE LightSpeed multislice CT (MSCT) and Discovery PET/CT scanners, which have the cine CT scan capability. Two new features have been added in this 4D-CT over the commercial Advantage 4D-CT from GE. One feature was a new tool for disabling parts of the respiratory signal with irregular respiration and improving the accuracy of phase determination for the respiratory signal from the Varian real-time positioning and monitoring (RPM) system before sorting of the cine CT images into the 4D-CT images. The second feature was to allow generation of the maximum-intensity-projection (MIP), average (AVG) and minimum-intensity-projection (mip) CT images from the cine CT images without a respiratory signal. The implementation enables the assessment of tumor motion in treatment planning with the MIP, AVG, and mip CT images on the GE MSCT and PET/CT scanners without the RPM and the Advantage 4D-CT with a GE Advantage windows workstation. Several clinical examples are included to illustrate this new application.