According to Statistics Canada, 145,500 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in Canada, and 68,300 Canadians will die of cancer in 2004. Every week, 2,798 Canadians are diagnosed with cancer.
Radiation therapy is the use of high-energy penetrating rays or subatomic particles to destroy the tumor. The goal is killing cancerous cells by delivering a high dose of radiation to the tumor while
preserving/sparing healthy tissues.
The linear accelerator, LINAC, is A machine that creates high energy radiation to treat cancer, using electricity to form a stream of fast-moving subatomic particles.
Radiation therapy is a widely used treatment of cancer. We focus on different aspects of medical imaging in the radiotherapy:
- Enhancement and restoration of portal images (megavoltage images)
- Multimodal image fusion for patient set-up verification
- Image Registration
- Image Segmentation
- Challenges of treatment planning