Multi-Scale Cascaded With Cross-Attention Network-Based Deformation Vector Field Estimation for Motion-Compensated 4D-CBCT Reconstruction

Abstract

Four-Dimensional Cone Beam Computed Tomography (4D-CBCT) imaging technology offers enhanced image quality and spatial resolution for intraoperative guidance, facilitating real-time tracking of tumor position changes during radiotherapy. However, this is still a task of great challenges due to insufficient projections at each respiratory phase after phase-sorting, and the image phases reconstructed directly from phase-sorted data are discrete and discontinuous. To generate high-quality 4D-CBCT deformation vector fields (DVFs), this paper leverages the preoperative static prior image to guide intraoperative dynamic sparse-view reconstruction images for reducing anatomical structure differences, ultimately achieving continuous and dynamic 4D-CBCT imaging. In this paper, we propose a Multi-scale Cascaded residual deformable vector field estimation framework based on Cross-attention in Motion-compensated 4D-CBCT reconstruction (MCCM), which combines Multi-Scale Cascaded residual registration network (MSC-Net), Cross-Attention Enhanced feature Fusion (CAEF) module and Structure-Enhanced Motion-Compensated (SEMC) module: 1) the MCCM employs a multi-scale cascaded residual network strategy, merging multi-receptive fields and multi-resolution feature maps for large-scale internal changes. 2) the CAEF is embedded into MSC-Net to facilitate effective communication and learning between features and promote the flow of information. 3) the SEMC is developed to reduce artifacts after intraoperative CBCT sparse-view reconstruction, restore global lung motion changes and local details, and enhance structural information through image fusion. The proposed method has been evaluated using simulated and clinical datasets and has shown promising results by comparative experiment. Our approach exhibits significant improvements across various evaluation metrics.