Advanced Portal Images Processing for Cobalt Radiotherapy Systems and Lineal Accelerator for cancer treatment

It is presented an investigation project to design software that allows image processing and treatment of an Electronic Portal Image Device (EPID) for lineal accelerators and cobalt machines. For the development of the software it was used the programming language MATLAB and DICOM RT images with a spatial resolution in the isocenter of 0.40 mm/pixel, dimensions of 1024x1024 pixels and 65536 tones in grey scale, that were taken by a linac from Elekta trademark located in the National Institute of Oncology and Radiobiology. Methods and algorithms implemented were the improvements in the contrast, brightness, equalization and inversion of grey scale of images through modifications in their histogram; the possibility of making rotations, segmentations of zones of interest basing in users criteria for thresholding taking in count the visualization of pixels intensity and measuring of distances in pixels. For the calculations of displacements and rotations between the reference and the actual image was used the canny method for edges detection of the radiation fields and anatomical structures, and normalized bidimensional correlation algorithms for seeking and calculation of objects of interest between two images. The results were obtained using 23 pairs of images of six treatments and the average of the reported errors were: horizontal, vertical and rotational fields errors: ± .531 mm, ± 1.278 mm and ± 0.087o ; horizontal, vertical and rotational anatomical structures errors: ± 0.766 mm, ± 0.573 mm, ± 0.174o . these values are under the limit values for each one of these treatments according to the consulted bibliography. (Author)