Quantifying ventilation change due to radiation therapy using 4DCT Jacobian calculations

Purpose: Regional ventilation and its response to radiation dose can be estimated using four-dimensional computed tomography (4DCT) and image registration. This study investigated the impact of radiation therapy (RT) on ventilation and the dependence of radiation-induced ventilation change on pre-RT ventilation derived from 4DCT. Methods and materials: Three 4DCT scans were acquired from each of 12 subjects: two scans before RT and one scan 3 months after RT. The 4DCT datasets were used to generate the pre-RT and post-RT ventilation maps by registering the inhale phase image to the exhale phase image and computing the Jacobian determinant of the resulting transformation. The ventilation change between pre-RT and post-RT was calculated by taking a ratio of the post-RT Jacobian map to the pre-RT Jacobian map. The voxel-wise ventilation change between pre- and post-RT was investigated as a function of dose and pre-RT ventilation. Results: Lung regions receiving over 20 Gy exhibited a significant decrease in function (3.3%, P < 0.01) compared to those receiving less than 20 Gy. When the voxels were stratified into high and low pre-RT function by thresholding the Jacobian map at 10% volume expansion (Jacobian = 1.1), high-function voxels exhibited 4.8% reduction in function for voxels receiving over 20 Gy, a significantly greater decline (P = 0.037) than the 2.4% reduction in function for low-function voxels. Ventilation decreased linearly with dose in both high-function and low-function regions. High-function regions showed a significantly larger decline in ventilation (P ≪ 0.001) as dose increased (1.4% ventilation reduction/10 Gy) compared to low-function regions (0.3% ventilation reduction/10 Gy). With further stratification of pre-RT ventilation, voxels exhibited increasing dose-dependent ventilation reduction with increasing pre-RT ventilation, with the largest pre-RT Jacobian bin (pre-RT Jacobian between 1.5 and 1.6) exhibiting a ventilation reduction of 4.8% per 10 Gy. Conclusions: Significant ventilation reductions were measured after radiation therapy treatments, and were dependent on the dose delivered to the tissue and the pre-RT ventilation of the tissue. For a fixed radiation dose, lung tissue with high pre-RT ventilation experienced larger decreases in post-RT ventilation than lung tissue with low pre-RT ventilation.