Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancer-related death in the United States. Early detection through screening is crucial, as the disease is most treatable during this phase. Screening typically involves a technician performing a low-dose CT scan (LDCT) to detect lung abnormalities. However, the conventional workflow involves several manual positioning steps. Firstly, the patient must be correctly positioned on the examination table, ensuring optimal orientation. Before the actual CT scan, a scout scan, often a topogram in either AP or lateral orientation, or both, is performed. This scout scan serves two crucial purposes: defining the bounds of the organ of interest (the lungs) and estimating the patient-specific dose profile, essential for maintaining patient safety. While LDCTs are obtained in a single breath-hold and do not require contrast agents, the scout scan consumes a substantial portion of the workflow time. “We propose to get rid of the scout scan by introducing a new method for estimating the position of thepatient’s internal anatomyand the isocenter of the patient to be able to position the table,” Brian begins. “Most importantly, we need to estimate the patient’s specific Water Equivalent Diameter (WED), which is a measure of the patient’s internal attenuation that is used to compute dose.” The proposed technique draws from a training dataset of over 60,000 patients to estimate the internal dose profile. One of the highlights of this method is its 12 DAILY MICCAI Monday Poster Presentation Automated CT Lung Cancer Screening Workflow using 3D Camera Brian Teixeira is a Senior Research Scientist for Siemens Healthineers. He speaks to us about his work on automating lung cancer screening ahead of his poster this afternoon.
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