Methods for automatic target identification, tracking, and safety evaluation for radiotherapy

A method for evaluating a PET signal for radiotherapy, the method comprising:

• acquiring PET imaging data of a patient region that includes a biology targeting zone (BTZ) region and a target region within the BTZ region;
• determining a location of the target region within the BTZ region based on the PET imaging data;
• calculating a target region standard uptake value (SUV) for pixels of the PET imaging data within the target region;
• calculating a BTZ region SUV for pixels of the PET imaging data outside the target region and within the BTZ region;
• calculating a normalized PET signal metric value of the target region using the target region SUV and the BTZ region SUV;
• and
• evaluating the PET imaging data by comparing the normalized PET signal metric value with a planning PET signal metric value.

A method of tracking a target region, the method comprising:

• acquiring PET imaging data of a target region;
• identifying, using the acquired PET imaging data and a tumor identification (ID) profile, a location of the target region;
• determining whether the location of the target region is within a target region contour;
• and
• generating a notification if the location of the target region is outside a target region contour.

A method of tracking a target region, the method comprising:

• acquiring PET imaging data of a target region;
• identifying, using the acquired PET imaging data, a location of the target region, and wherein identifying the location of the target region comprises generating a map of pixel tumor likelihood values by calculating a tumor-likelihood value and background-likelihood value for each pixel of the PET imaging data and identifying the location of the target region by shifting a tumor contour within the PET imaging data to a centroid location of the map of pixel tumor likelihood values;
• determining whether the location of the target region is within a target region contour;
• and
• generating a notification if the location of the target region is outside a target region contour.