A new method for swallowing detection with binocular vision during radiotherapy

During the irradiation of laryngeal cancer, the motion caused by swallowing of patients leads to the nidus deviating from the target area, which results the decrease of therapeutic effect and the waste of dose. Therefore, it is necessary to detect the displacement, time and number of swallowing during radiotherapy. In this paper, a non-contact and non-invasive swallowing detection method based on binocular vision is proposed, which detects swallowing by capturing the motion of thyroid cartilage. In our method, first a marker is used to highlight the characteristics of thyroid cartilage; Second, an improved matching method was used to match the feature points; Then the three-dimensional shape of the thyroid cartilage was established for the identification of laryngeal prominence and extraction of motion signals Finally, the signals were processed to obtain the number, displacement and time of swallowing. Experiments were carried out on healthy people. The results show that our method is feasible for detecting the number and time of swallowing movement, and can measure the displacement in three dimensions.