Respiratory Motion Prediction in Radiation Therapy

Active respiratory motion management has received increasing attention in the past decade as a means to reduce the internal margin (IM) component of the clinical target volume (CTV)—planning target volume (PTV) margin typically added around the gross tumor volume (GTV) during radiation therapy of thoracic and abdominal tumors. Engineering and technical developments in linear accelerator design and respiratory motion monitoring respectively have made the delivery of motion adaptive radiation therapy possible through real-time control of either dynamic multileaf collimator (MLC) motion (gantry based linear accelerator design) or robotic arm motion (robotic arm mounted linear accelerator design).