arXiv subjects

Hao Yan

Publications and source records attributed to Hao Yan.

155 records · Page 9Linked to original sources

arXiv2014

A method for real-time volumetric imaging in radiotherapy using single x-ray projection

In this paper, we present a new method to generate an instantaneous volumetric image using a single x-ray projection. To fully extract motion information hidden in projection images, we partitioned a projection image into small patches. We utilized a sparse learning method to automatically select patches that have a high correlation with principal component analysis (PCA) coefficients of a lung motion model. A model that maps the patch intensity to the PCA coefficients is built along with the patch selection process. Based on this model, a measured projection can be used to predict the PCA coefficients, which are further used to generate a motion vector field and hence a volumetric image. We have also proposed an intensity baseline correction method based on the partitioned projection, where the first and the second moments of pixel intensities at a patch in a simulated image are matched with those in a measured image via a linear transformation. The proposed method has been valid in simulated data and real phantom data. The algorithm is able to identify patches that contain relevant motion information, e.g. diaphragm region. It is found that intensity correction step is important to remove the systematic error in the motion prediction. For the simulation case, the sparse learning model reduced prediction error for the first PCA coefficient to 5%, compared to the 10% error when sparse learning is not used. 95th percentile error for the predicted motion vector is reduced from 2.40 mm to 0.92mm. In the phantom case, the predicted tumor motion trajectory is successfully reconstructed with 0.82 mm mean vector field error compared to 1.66 mm error without using the sparse learning method. The algorithm robustness with respect to sparse level, patch size, and existence of diaphragm, as well as computation time, has also been studied.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2014

Direct observation of the transition from indirect to direct bandgap in atomically thin epitaxial MoSe2

Quantum systems in confined geometries are host to novel physical phenomena. Examples include quantum Hall systems in semiconductors and Dirac electrons in graphene. Interest in such systems has also been intensified by the recent discovery of a large enhancement in photoluminescence quantum efficiency and a potential route to valleytronics in atomically thin layers of transition metal dichalcogenides, MX2 (M = Mo, W; X = S, Se, Te), which are closely related to the indirect to direct bandgap transition in monolayers. Here, we report the first direct observation of the transition from indirect to direct bandgap in monolayer samples by using angle resolved photoemission spectroscopy on high-quality thin films of MoSe2 with variable thickness, grown by molecular beam epitaxy. The band structure measured experimentally indicates a stronger tendency of monolayer MoSe2 towards a direct bandgap, as well as a larger gap size, than theoretically predicted. Moreover, our finding of a significant spin-splitting of 180 meV at the valence band maximum of a monolayer MoSe2 film could expand its possible application to spintronic devices.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2013

Comprehensive Evaluations of Cone-beam CT dose in Image-guided Radiation Therapy via GPU-based Monte Carlo simulations

Cone beam CT (CBCT) has been widely used for patient setup in image guided radiation therapy (IGRT). Radiation dose from CBCT scans has become a clinical concern. The purposes of this study are 1) to commission a GPU-based Monte Carlo (MC) dose calculation package gCTD for Varian On-Board Imaging (OBI) system and test the calculation accuracy, and 2) to quantitatively evaluate CBCT dose from the OBI system in typical IGRT scan protocols. We first conducted dose measurements in a water phantom. X-ray source model parameters used in gCTD are obtained through a commissioning process. gCTD accuracy is demonstrated by comparing calculations with measurements in water and in CTDI phantoms. 25 brain cancer patients are used to study dose in a standard-dose head protocol, and 25 prostate cancer patients are used to study dose in pelvis protocol and pelvis spotlight protocol. Mean dose to each organ is calculated. Mean dose to 2% voxels that have the highest dose is also computed to quantify the maximum dose. It is found that the mean dose value to an organ varies largely among patients. Moreover, dose distribution is highly non-homogeneous inside an organ. The maximum dose is found to be 1~3 times higher than the mean dose depending on the organ, and is up to 8 times higher for the entire body due to the very high dose region in bony structures. High computational efficiency has also been observed in our studies, such that MC dose calculation time is less than 5 min for a typical case.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2013

Warping of accretion disk and launching of jet by a spinning black hole in NGC 4258

We fit the most updated broadband spectral energy distribution from radio to X-rays for NGC 4258 with a coupled accretion-jet model that surrounding a Kerr black hole (BH), where both the jet and the warped H_2O maser disk are assumed to be triggered by a spinning BH through Blandford-Znajek mechanism and Bardeen-Petterson effect respectively. The accretion flow consists with an inner radiatively inefficient accretion flow (RIAF) and an outer truncated standard thin disk, where the transition radius R_tr~3*10^3Rg for NGC 4258 based on the width and variability of its narrow Fe K$α$ line. The hybrid jet formation model, as a variant of Blandford-Znajek model, is used to model the jet power. Therefore, we can estimate the accretion rate and BH spin through the two observed quantities--X-ray emission and jet power, where the observed jet power is estimated from the low-frequency radio emission. Through this method, we find that the BH of NGC 4258 should be mildly spinning with dimensionless spin parameter a_*=0.7\pm0.2. The outer thin disk mainly radiates at near infrared waveband and the jet contributes predominantly at radio waveband. Using above estimated BH spin and the inferred accretion rate at the region of the maser disk based on the physical existence of the H_2 O maser, we find that the warp radius is ~8.6*10^4 R_g if it is driven by the Bardeen-Petterson effect, which is consistent with the observational result very well.

astro-ph.HE↗

arXiv2012

Extracting respiratory signals from thoracic cone beam CT projections

Patient respiratory signal associated with the cone beam CT (CBCT) projections is important for lung cancer radiotherapy. In contrast to monitoring an external surrogate of respiration, such signal can be extracted directly from the CBCT projections. In this paper, we propose a novel local principle component analysis (LPCA) method to extract the respiratory signal by distinguishing the respiration motion-induced content change from the gantry rotation-induced content change in the CBCT projections. The LPCA method is evaluated by comparing with three state-of-the-art projection-based methods, namely, the Amsterdam Shroud (AS) method, the intensity analysis (IA) method, and the Fourier-transform based phase analysis (FT-p) method. The clinical CBCT projection data of eight patients, acquired under various clinical scenarios, were used to investigate the performance of each method. We found that the proposed LPCA method has demonstrated the best overall performance for cases tested and thus is a promising technique for extracting respiratory signal. We also identified the applicability of each existing method.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2012

A GPU Tool for Efficient, Accurate, and Realistic Simulation of Cone Beam CT Projections

Simulation of x-ray projection images plays an important role in cone beam CT (CBCT) related research projects. A projection image contains primary signal, scatter signal, and noise. It is computationally demanding to perform accurate and realistic computations for all of these components. In this work, we develop a package on GPU, called gDRR, for the accurate and efficient computations of x-ray projection images in CBCT under clinically realistic conditions. The primary signal is computed by a tri-linear ray-tracing algorithm. A Monte Carlo (MC) simulation is then performed, yielding the primary signal and the scatter signal, both with noise. A denoising process is applied to obtain a smooth scatter signal. The noise component is then obtained by combining the difference between the MC primary and the ray-tracing primary signals, and the difference between the MC simulated scatter and the denoised scatter signals. Finally, a calibration step converts the calculated noise signal into a realistic one by scaling its amplitude. For a typical CBCT projection with a poly-energetic spectrum, the calculation time for the primary signal is 1.2~2.3 sec, while the MC simulations take 28.1~95.3 sec. Computation time for all other steps is negligible. The ray-tracing primary signal matches well with the primary part of the MC simulation result. The MC simulated scatter signal using gDRR is in agreement with EGSnrc results with a relative difference of 3.8%. A noise calibration process is conducted to calibrate gDRR against a real CBCT scanner. The calculated projections are accurate and realistic, such that beam-hardening artifacts and scatter artifacts can be reproduced using the simulated projections. The noise amplitudes in the CBCT images reconstructed from the simulated projections also agree with those in the measured images at corresponding mAs levels.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2012

CT to Cone-beam CT Deformable Registration With Simultaneous Intensity Correction

Computed tomography (CT) to cone-beam computed tomography (CBCT) deformable image registration (DIR) is a crucial step in adaptive radiation therapy. Current intensity-based registration algorithms, such as demons, may fail in the context of CT-CBCT DIR because of inconsistent intensities between the two modalities. In this paper, we propose a variant of demons, called Deformation with Intensity Simultaneously Corrected (DISC), to deal with CT-CBCT DIR. DISC distinguishes itself from the original demons algorithm by performing an adaptive intensity correction step on the CBCT image at every iteration step of the demons registration. Specifically, the intensity correction of a voxel in CBCT is achieved by matching the first and the second moments of the voxel intensities inside a patch around the voxel with those on the CT image. It is expected that such a strategy can remove artifacts in the CBCT image, as well as ensuring the intensity consistency between the two modalities. DISC is implemented on computer graphics processing units (GPUs) in compute unified device architecture (CUDA) programming environment. The performance of DISC is evaluated on a simulated patient case and six clinical head-and-neck cancer patient data. It is found that DISC is robust against the CBCT artifacts and intensity inconsistency and significantly improves the registration accuracy when compared with the original demons.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2012

A comprehensive study on the relationship between image quality and imaging dose in low-dose cone beam CT

While compressed sensing (CS) based reconstructions have been developed for low-dose CBCT, a clear understanding on the relationship between the image quality and imaging dose at low dose levels is needed. In this paper, we qualitatively investigate this subject in a comprehensive manner with extensive experimental and simulation studies. The basic idea is to plot image quality and imaging dose together as functions of number of projections and mAs per projection over the whole clinically relevant range. A clear understanding on the tradeoff between image quality and dose can be achieved and optimal low-dose CBCT scan protocols can be developed for various imaging tasks in IGRT. Main findings of this work include: 1) Under the CS framework, image quality has little degradation over a large dose range, and the degradation becomes evident when the dose < 100 total mAs. A dose < 40 total mAs leads to a dramatic image degradation. Optimal low-dose CBCT scan protocols likely fall in the dose range of 40-100 total mAs, depending on the specific IGRT applications. 2) Among different scan protocols at a constant low-dose level, the super sparse-view reconstruction with projection number less than 50 is the most challenging case, even with strong regularization. Better image quality can be acquired with other low mAs protocols. 3) The optimal scan protocol is the combination of a medium number of projections and a medium level of mAs/view. This is more evident when the dose is around 72.8 total mAs or below and when the ROI is a low-contrast or high-resolution object. Based on our results, the optimal number of projections is around 90 to 120. 4) The clinically acceptable lowest dose level is task dependent. In our study, 72.8mAs is a safe dose level for visualizing low-contrast objects, while 12.2 total mAs is sufficient for detecting high-contrast objects of diameter greater than 3 mm.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2011

Fast Monte Carlo Simulation for Patient-specific CT/CBCT Imaging Dose Calculation

Recently, X-ray imaging dose from computed tomography (CT) or cone beam CT (CBCT) scans has become a serious concern. Patient-specific imaging dose calculation has been proposed for the purpose of dose management. While Monte Carlo (MC) dose calculation can be quite accurate for this purpose, it suffers from low computational efficiency. In response to this problem, we have successfully developed a MC dose calculation package, gCTD, on GPU architecture under the NVIDIA CUDA platform for fast and accurate estimation of the x-ray imaging dose received by a patient during a CT or CBCT scan. Techniques have been developed particularly for the GPU architecture to achieve high computational efficiency. Dose calculations using CBCT scanning geometry in a homogeneous water phantom and a heterogeneous Zubal head phantom have shown good agreement between gCTD and EGSnrc, indicating the accuracy of our code. In terms of improved efficiency, it is found that gCTD attains a speed-up of ~400 times in the homogeneous water phantom and ~76.6 times in the Zubal phantom compared to EGSnrc. As for absolute computation time, imaging dose calculation for the Zubal phantom can be accomplished in ~17 sec with the average relative standard deviation of 0.4%. Though our gCTD code has been developed and tested in the context of CBCT scans, with simple modification of geometry it can be used for assessing imaging dose in CT scans as well.

physics.med-ph↗

arXiv2011

Stability of Steady Solutions to Reaction-Hyperbolic Systems for Axonal Transport

This paper is concerned with the stability of steady solutions to initial-boundary-value problems of reaction-hyperbolic systems for axonal transport. Under proper structural assumptions, we clarify the relaxation structure of the reaction-hyperbolic systems and show the time-asymptotic stability of steady solutions or relaxation boundary-layers.

math.AP↗

arXiv2010

Weak entropy solutions of nonlinear reaction-hyperbolic systems for axonal transport

This paper is concerned with a class of nonlinear reaction-hyperbolic systems as models for axonal transport in neuroscience. We show the global existence of entropy-satisfying BV-solutions to the initial-value problems by using hyperbolic-type methods. Moreover, we rigorously justify the limit as the biochemical processes are much faster than the transport ones.

math.AP↗