Learning-Based Estimation of Spatially Resolved Scatter Radiation Fields in Interventional Radiology

TL;DR

This paper introduces neural network models for interactive, three-dimensional estimation of scatter radiation fields in interventional radiology, supported by synthetic datasets and open-source tools.

Contribution

It presents three neural network variants and a training pipeline for accurate scatter radiation estimation, along with synthetic datasets generated via Monte Carlo simulations.

Findings

Neural networks achieved good spatial agreement with ground-truth radiation fields.

The models demonstrated particularly strong performance within specific regions of interest.

SMAPE metric remained above 84%, indicating room for improvement in out-of-field dosimetry.

Abstract

We present three variants of a lightweight, fully connected artificial neural network, suited for interactive estimation of three-dimensional, spatially resolved volumes of scattered radiation fields and a corresponding training pipeline for radiation protection dosimetry in medical radiation fields, such as those found in interventional radiology and cardiology. Accompanying, we present three different synthetically generated datasets with increasing complexity for training, generated using RadField3D, a Monte Carlo simulation application based on Geant4. As the primary scatter object, we employed the torso of a male Alderson RANDO phantom. On those datasets, we evaluate convolutional and fully connected architectures of neural networks to demonstrate which design decisions work well for reconstructing the fluence and spectra distributions over the spatial domain of such radiation fields. All our datasets, as well as our training pipeline, are published as open source in separate repositories. To evaluate the presented neural networks, we define and assess several metrics. Across these measures, the model variants demonstrate good spatial agreement between predicted and ground-truth radiation fields, particularly within specific regions of interest within the radiation field. Of particular relevance for potential application in out-of-field dosimetry is the SMAPE of the scatter radiation field, which represents the most challenging metric and was consistently above 84 %.