4D CT image simulation using B-Spline deformable model and cosine interpolation of deformation field.

Four-dimensional computed tomography(4D CT) is significant in radiotherapy treatment planning for thorax and upper abdomen to take their motion induced by respiration into consideration, but its high radiation dose becomes a major concern and impedes its wide application. To solve the problem, we propose an image interpolation approach to get 4D CT simulation images. We simulate 4D CT images at arbitrary intermediate phases by B-Spline deformable model with cosine interpolation of the deformation field, which is obtained by deformable registration of two CT images at end-exhale and end-inhale phases. The mean of absolute differences computed between actual 4D CT images and simulation ones is used to evaluate the accuracy of simulation. Our experiment results show that both linear interpolation and cosine interpolation with proper parameters perform well and the latter performs a little better than the former in general.