The American Cancer Society estimates that 55,440 people will be diagnosed with and 44,330 will die of pancreatic cancer in 2018. An emerging treatment for this particularly lethal type of cancer involves utilizing extremely large and localized doses of radiation (stereotactic radiotherapy) to shrink the tumor and make patients candidates for surgical resection. Metal fiducial markers are commonly used for improving the target accuracy of radiation, however, commercially-available software for the tracking of fiducial markers cannot reliably identify markers, hindering physician productivity. A fully automated method of tracking fiducial markers in x-ray images has been developed by a University of Colorado research group led by Dr. Bernard Jones. This method requires no input from the user and has been shown to reliably improve accuracy of radiation treatment. In phantom and patient studies, the method automatically tracked visible marker clusters in 100% of over 10,000 projection images tested and was shown to be robust against several confounding factors. The technology has the potential of reducing significantly the detrimental consequence of unintended radiation to healthy tissues for millions of people under stereotactic radiotherapy.
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