Lianli Liu

All Publications

• Real Time Volumetric MRI for 3D Motion Tracking via Geometry-Informed Deep Learning. Medical physics Liu, L., Shen, L., Johansson, A., Balter, J. M., Cao, Y., Chang, D., Xing, L. 2022

  Abstract

  To develop a geometry-informed deep learning framework for volumetric MRI with sub-second acquisition time in support of 3D motion tracking, which is highly desirable for improved radiotherapy precision but hindered by the long image acquisition time.A 2D-3D deep learning network with an explicitly defined geometry module that embeds geometric priors of the k-space encoding pattern was investigated, where a 2D generation network first augmented the sparsely sampled image dataset by generating new 2D representations of the underlying 3D subject. A geometry module then unfolded the 2D representations to the volumetric space. Finally, a 3D refinement network took the unfolded 3D data and outputted high-resolution volumetric images. Patient-specific models were trained for 7 abdominal patients to reconstruct volumetric MRI from both orthogonal cine slices and sparse radial samples. To evaluate the robustness of the proposed method to longitudinal patient anatomy and position changes, we tested the trained model on separate datasets acquired more than one month later and evaluated 3D target motion tracking accuracy using the model-reconstructed images by deforming a reference MRI with gross tumor volume (GTV) contours to a 5-min time series of both ground truth and model-reconstructed volumetric images with a temporal resolution of 340 ms.Across the 7 patients evaluated, the median distances between model-predicted and ground truth GTV centroids in the superior-inferior direction were 0.4±0.3 mm and 0.5±0.4 mm for cine and radial acquisitions respectively. The 95-percentile Hausdorff distances between model-predicted and ground truth GTV contours were 4.7±1.1 mm and 3.2±1.5 mm for cine and radial acquisitions, which are of the same scale as cross-plane image resolution.Incorporating geometric priors into deep learning model enables volumetric imaging with high spatial and temporal resolution, which is particularly valuable for 3D motion tracking and has the potential of greatly improving MRI-guided radiotherapy precision. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

  View details for DOI 10.1002/mp.15822

  View details for PubMedID 35766221

• Volumetric prediction of breathing and slow drifting motion in the abdomen using radial MRI and multi-temporal resolution modeling. Physics in medicine and biology Liu, L., Johansson, A., Cao, Y., Lawrence, T. S., Balter, J. M. 2021; 66 (17)

  Abstract

  Abdominal organ motions introduce geometric uncertainties to radiotherapy. This study investigates a multi-temporal resolution 3D motion prediction scheme that accounts for both breathing and slow drifting motion in the abdomen in support of MRI-guided radiotherapy. Ten-minute MRI scans were acquired for 8 patients using a volumetric golden-angle stack-of-stars sequence. The first five-minutes was used for patient-specific motion modeling. Fast breathing motion was modeled from high temporal resolution radial k-space samples, which served as a navigator signal to sort k-space data into different bins for high spatial resolution reconstruction of breathing motion states. Slow drifting motion was modeled from a lower temporal resolution image time series which was reconstructed by sequentially combining a large number of breathing-corrected k-space samples. Principal components analysis (PCA) was performed on deformation fields between different motion states. Gaussian kernel regression and linear extrapolation were used to predict PCA coefficients of future motion states for breathing motion (340 ms ahead of acquisition) and slow drifting motion (8.5 s ahead of acquisition) respectively. k-space data from the remaining five-minutes was used to compare ground truth motions states obtained from retrospective reconstruction/deformation with predictions. Median distances between predicted and ground truth centroid positions of gross tumor volume (GTV) and organs at risk (OARs) were less than 1 mm on average. 95- percentile Hausdorff distances between predicted and ground truth GTV contours of various breathing motions states were 2 mm on average, which was smaller than the imaging resolution and 95-percentile Hausdorff distances between predicted and ground truth OAR contours of different slow drifting motion states were less than 0.2 mm. These results suggest that multi-temporal resolution motion models are capable of volumetric predictions of breathing and slow drifting motion with sufficient accuracy and temporal resolution for MRI-based tracking, and thus have potential for supporting MRI-guided abdominal radiotherapy.

  View details for DOI 10.1088/1361-6560/ac1f37

  View details for PubMedID 34412047

• Modeling intra-fractional abdominal configuration changes using breathing motion-corrected radial MRI PHYSICS IN MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY Liu, L., Johansson, A., Cao, Y., Kashani, R., Lawrence, T. S., Balter, J. M. 2021; 66 (8)

  Abstract

  Abdominal organ motions introduce geometric uncertainties to gastrointestinal radiotherapy. This study investigated slow drifting motion induced by changes of internal anatomic organ arrangements using a 3D radial MRI sequence with a scan length of 20 minutes. Breathing motion and cyclic GI motion were first removed through multi-temporal resolution image reconstruction. Slow drifting motion analysis was performed using an image time series consisting of 72 image volumes with a temporal sampling rate of 17 seconds. B-spline deformable registration was performed to align image volumes of the time series to a reference volume. The resulting deformation fields were used for motion velocity evaluation and patient-specific motion model construction through principal component analysis (PCA). Geometric uncertainties introduced by slow drifting motion were assessed by Hausdorff distances between unions of organs at risk (OARs) at different motion states and reference OAR contours as well as probabilistic distributions of OARs predicted using the PCA model. Thirteen examinations from 11 patients were included in this study. The averaged motion velocities ranged from 0.8 to 1.9 mm/min, 0.7 to 1.6 mm/min, 0.6 to 2.0 mm/min and 0.7 to 1.4 mm/min for the small bowel, colon, duodenum and stomach respectively; the averaged Hausdorff distances were 5.6 mm, 5.3 mm, 5.1 mm and 4.6 mm. On average, a margin larger than 4.5 mm was needed to cover a space with OAR occupancy probability higher than 55%. Temporal variations of geometric uncertainties were evaluated by comparing across four 5-min sub-scans extracted from the full scan. Standard deviations of Hausdorff distances across sub-scans were less than 1mm for most examinations, indicating stability of relative margin estimates from separate time windows. These results suggested slow drifting motion of GI organs is significant and geometric uncertainties introduced by such motion should be accounted for during radiotherapy planning and delivery.

  View details for DOI 10.1088/1361-6560/abef42

  View details for Web of Science ID 000639521700001

  View details for PubMedID 33725676