Construction of a registration and fusion of unreformed thin-sectional high-resolution sectional anatomical image (Chinese Visible Human images) and CT and MRI images based on B-spline and mutual information and its application in segmenting nasopharyngeal structures in Treatment Planning System (TP

Background To help radiotherapy doctors recognize and segment the nasopharyngeal organs in risk of Nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) and make radiotherapy plan. Materials/Methods: Based on the continuous thin-layer, high-precision, high-resolution and true-color sectional anatomical data (Chinese Visible Human (CVH) images),we used B-spline and mutual information to transform, register and fuse the CVH images with the patient's personalized CT images, and integrated them into the Treatment Planning System (TPS). Consequently, Three-Dimensional Visualization Treatment Planning System (3DV + TPS) was created. To verify it, 3DV + TPS was deployed to identify and segment the nasopharyngeal organs in risk of NPC, and a questionnaire was filled out by radiotherapy doctors. Results Result shows that 3DV + TPS can finish registration and fusion of 4 sets of sectional anatomical images and individual CT images of patients in approximately 3 minutes and 50 seconds. Conclusion The registered and fused images can accurately reflect the position, outline and adjacent space of the nasopharyngeal structure which is not clear in the CT images. Thus, it is helpful for recognizing and segmenting neural, muscular and glandular structures. Through automatically registering and fusing of color images and CT gray images, 3DV + TPS improves the accuracy and efficiency of recognizing nasopharyngeal structures in making radiotherapy plan, and it is useful to improve the teaching quality of tumor radiotherapy for medical students and interns as well.