Patient-specific stopping power calibration for proton therapy planning based on single-detector proton radiography

A simple robust optimizer has been developed that can produce patient-specific calibration curves to convert x-ray computed tomography (CT) numbers to relative stopping powers (HU-RSPs) for proton therapy treatment planning. The difference between a digitally reconstructed radiograph water-equivalent path length (DRR_WEPL) map through the x-ray CT dataset and a proton radiograph (set as the ground truth) is minimized by optimizing the HU-RSP calibration curve. The function of the optimizer is validated with synthetic datasets that contain no noise and its robustness is shown against CT noise. Application of the procedure is then demonstrated on a plastic and a real tissue phantom, with proton radiographs produced using a single detector. The mean errors using generic/optimized calibration curves between the DRR_WEPL map and the proton radiograph were 1.8/0.4% for a plastic phantom and −2.1/ − 0.2% for a real tissue phantom. It was then demonstrated that these optimized calibration curves offer a better prediction of the water equivalent path length at a therapeutic depth. We believe that these promising results are suggestive that a single proton radiograph could be used to generate a patient-specific calibration curve as part of the current proton treatment planning workflow. (paper)