Autoactivation: a new imaging tool for the CT/MR based reconstruction and treatment planning in brachytherapy

A new stable, fast, flexible and user independent algorithm has been implemented and tested for the automatic detection of those dwell positions on catheters that are inside target or within a distance from the target surface and keep a distance from other critical structures. We term this algorithm autoactivation algorithm and it helps the clinicians in treatment planning in brachytherapy. Especially in complicated implants (see Figure 1) the time needed for manual selection of dwell positions is more than 20% of the time required (see Table I) for dose treatment planning. We test this algorithm in some test cases and in our clinical practice, The results presented here are encouraging.