Collaborative Research ITR/NGS: An Integrated Simulation Environment for High-Resolution Computational Methods in Electromagnetics with Biomedical Applications

合作研究 ITR/NGS：电磁学与生物医学应用高分辨率计算方法的集成仿真环境

• 批准号: 0324911
• 负责人: Timothy Warburton
• 金额: $ 2.25万
• 依托单位: University of New Mexico
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2004
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2004-01-15 至 2005-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0324911&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; ITR; NGS; Integrated

Current technologies for radiationbased treatment of cancerous tumors rely almost exclusively on diagnosticimages such as MRI and PET scans to enable a careful targeting of multiple high-intensity beams.However, the very complex nature of the penetration of radiation energy into the biological tissue makes such targeting difficult and error-prone, possibly even prohibiting radiative treatment due to the risk of damaging essential tissue in close proximity to the cancerous areas. Such issues are naturally of particular concern in relation to treatment of brain cancer.This project will conduct research on the development of a simulation environment which eventually will provide a virtual patient-specific model of the area of interest and an ability to accurately and efficiently model wave-propagation within such an environment, with the potential to ultimately provide the radiation specialist with an online tool for fine tuning the targeting of radiation energy and, at a future stage, perhaps even model the impact of the energy deposition and heat release on the tissue.The project will develop an environment comprising of (a) the cleaning and segmentation of MRI data, including data with noise sensitivity, (b) extraction of material data and construction of a patient-specific volume model of the target of interest, (c) the generation of high-order, curvilinear, finite elements grids, (d) full as well as reduced order modeling of the penetration/refraction of electromagnetic energy into the volume model, and (e) visualization and extraction of physiological data of interest. These different elements will be integrated into a flexible, stand-alone environment and will, as part of the development, be tested extensively on phantom data as well as real MRI data, possibly with added artificial noiseto explore robustness.The key developments will include new image segmentation and cleaning algorithms, improved material models, the development of efficient high-order accurate computational schemes for wave-propagation, efficient methods for domain truncation, and tools for visualization and data extraction. These are all problems of generic importance with potential for impact well beyond the particular application being considered.

当前用于癌性肿瘤放射治疗的技术几乎完全依赖于 MRI 和 PET 扫描等诊断图像，以实现多个高强度光束的仔细瞄准。然而，辐射能量渗透到生物组织中的非常复杂的性质使得这种瞄准成为可能。困难且容易出错，甚至可能禁止放射治疗，因为存在损坏靠近癌变区域的重要组织的风险。这些问题自然在脑癌治疗方面受到特别关注。该项目将进行模拟环境开发的研究，最终将提供感兴趣区域的虚拟患者特定模型以及准确有效建模的能力在这样的环境中进行波传播，有可能最终为辐射专家提供一个在线工具，用于微调辐射能量的目标，并且在未来阶段，甚至可能模拟能量沉积和热量释放对辐射能量的影响。该项目将开发一个环境，包括 (a) 清洁MRI 数据的分割，包括噪声敏感性数据，(b) 提取材料数据并构建感兴趣目标的患者特定体积模型，(c) 生成高阶曲线有限元网格， （d）电磁能穿透/折射到体积模型的全阶和降阶建模，以及（e）感兴趣的生理数据的可视化和提取。这些不同的元素将被集成到一个灵活的独立环境中，并且作为开发的一部分，将在模型数据和真实 MRI 数据上进行广泛的测试，可能会添加人工噪声来探索鲁棒性。关键的开发将包括新的图像分割和清理算法、改进的材料模型、开发用于波传播的高效高阶精确计算方案、有效的域截断方法以及可视化和数据提取工具。这些都是具有普遍重要性的问题，其影响可能远远超出所考虑的特定应用。