Improving Gamma Imaging in Proton Therapy by Sanitizing Compton Camera Simulated Patient Data using Neural Networks through the BRIDE Pipeline

Abstract

Precision medicine in cancer treatment increasingly relies on advanced radiotherapies, such as proton beam radiotherapy, to enhance efficacy of the treatment. When the proton beam in this treatment interacts with patient matter, the excited nuclei may emit prompt gamma ray interactions that can be captured by a Compton camera. The image reconstruction from this captured data faces the issue of mischaracterizing the sequences of incoming scattering events, leading to excessive background noise. To address this problem, several machine learning models such as Feedfoward Neural Networks (FNN) and Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) were developed in PyTorch to properly characterize the scattering sequences on simulated datasets, including newly-created patient medium data, which were generated by using a pipeline comprised of the GEANT4 and Monte-Carlo Detector Effects (MCDE) softwares. These models were implemented using the novel ‘Big-data REU Integrated Development and Experimentation’ (BRIDE) platform, a modular pipeline that streamlines preprocessing, feature engineering, and model development and evaluation on parallelized GPU processors. Hyperparameter studies were done on the novel patient data as well as on water phantom datasets used during previous research. Patient data was more difficult than water phantom data to classify for both FNN and RNN models. FNN models had higher accuracy on patient medium data but lower accuracy on water phantom data when compared to RNN models. Previous results on several different datasets were reproduced on BRIDE and multiple new models achieved greater performance than in previous research.