Investigation of the robustness of adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system for tracking moving tumors in external radiotherapy.

In external radiotherapy of dynamic targets such as lung and breast cancers, accurate correlation models are utilized to extract real time tumor position by means of external surrogates in correlation with the internal motion of tumors. In this study, a correlation method based on the neuro-fuzzy model is proposed to correlate the input external motion data with internal tumor motion estimation in real-time mode, due to its robustness in motion tracking. An initial test of the performance of this model was reported in our previous studies. In this work by implementing some modifications it is resulted that ANFIS is still robust to track tumor motion more reliably by reducing the motion estimation error remarkably. After configuring new version of our ANFIS model, its performance was retrospectively tested over ten patients treated with Synchrony Cyberknife system. In order to assess the performance of our model, the predicted tumor motion as model output was compared with respect to the state of the art model. Final analyzed results show that our adaptive neuro-fuzzy model can reduce tumor tracking errors more significantly, as compared with ground truth database and even tumor tracking methods presented in our previous works.