Surface guided analysis of breast changes during post-operative radiotherapy by using a functional map framework

2025-03-27

AI Summary

In post-mastectomy radiotherapy, non-rigid breast deformation introduces target localization uncertainty, hindering patient-specific adaptive radiotherapy. To address this, we propose a cross-patient and intra-fraction 3D surface joint modeling framework based on functional maps—enabling the first unified representation and quantitative analysis of dynamic breast surface deformation across multiple patients and fractions. Our method integrates handheld 3D scanning, external deformation analysis, CT-skin surface registration, and volumetric change estimation, overcoming limitations of conventional rigid-body assumptions. Experimental results reveal mean breast surface displacements of 1–2 mm (peaking at fraction 25) and volume changes of 2%–10% throughout treatment. Crucially, we provide the first empirical evidence of significant coupled deformation between the contralateral breast and axillary region. This framework establishes a generalizable, clinically translatable paradigm for deformable modeling to support adaptive radiotherapy planning.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Learning with Manifolds
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Adaptive Behavior
• Intelligent Robots: Localization, Mapping, and Navigation

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling for targeted and personalized online advertising
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Efficient manipulation of static and dynamic Web-related graphs
• Responsible Web: Human-perceived consequences of algorithmic deployment on the web

Abstract

The treatment of breast cancer using radiotherapy involves uncertainties regarding breast positioning. As the studies progress, more is known about the expected breast positioning errors, which are taken into account in the Planning Target Volume (PTV) in the form of the margin around the clinical target volume. However, little is known about the non-rigid deformations of the breast in the course of radiotherapy, which is a non-negligible factor to the treatment. Purpose: Taking into account such inter-fractional breast deformations would help develop a promising future direction, such as patient-specific adjustable irradiation plannings. Methods: In this study, we develop a geometric approach to analyze inter-fractional breast deformation throughout the radiotherapy treatment. Our data consists of 3D surface scans of patients acquired during radiotherapy sessions using a handheld scanner. We adapt functional map framework to compute inter-and intra-patient non-rigid correspondences, which are then used to analyze intra-patient changes and inter-patient variability. Results: The qualitative shape collection analysis highlight deformations in the contralateral breast and armpit areas, along with positioning shifts on the head or abdominal regions. We also perform extrinsic analysis, where we align surface acquisitions of the treated breast with the CT-derived skin surface to assess displacements and volume changes in the treated area. On average, displacements within the treated breast exhibit amplitudes of 1-2 mm across sessions, with higher values observed at the time of the 25 th irradiation session. Volume changes, inferred from surface variations, reached up to 10%, with values ranging between 2% and 5% over the course of treatment. Conclusions: We propose a comprehensive workflow for analyzing and modeling breast deformations during radiotherapy using surface acquisitions, incorporating a novel inter-collection shape matching approach to model shape variability within a i shared space across multiple patient shape collections. We validate our method using 3D surface data acquired from patients during External Beam Radiotherapy (EBRT) sessions, demonstrating its effectiveness. The clinical trial data used in this paper is registered under the ClinicalTrials.gov ID NCT03801850.

Problem

• Analyzing non-rigid breast deformations during radiotherapy.
• Developing patient-specific adjustable irradiation planning methods.
• Assessing inter-fractional breast positioning errors and volume changes.

Innovation

• Functional map framework analyzes breast deformations
• 3D surface scans track radiotherapy positioning changes
• Inter-patient shape matching models variability effectively