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10 1109@tbme 2012 2206591 PDF
10 1109@tbme 2012 2206591 PDF
10 1109@tbme 2012 2206591 PDF
it better than the existing contact devices that are sensitive to the
surrounding environment. In radar respiration measurement, the
radar sensor suffers from dc offset at the RF front-end output,
which is mainly caused by the reflections from stationary objects
surrounding the body. The dc offset may saturate or limit the
dynamic range of the following stages of baseband amplifiers.
To overcome this demerit, ac coupling has been commonly used
in radar sensors. However, due to the high-pass characteristics
of the coupling capacitor, ac coupling leads to significant signal
distortion when the target motion has a very low frequency or
a dc component. Respiration is such a motion that is low fre-
quency of less than 0.5 Hz and tends to rest for a while at the
end of expiration (EOE), i.e., there is a short stationary mo-
ment after lung deflation. This is a problem in radar respiration
measurement. To deal with it, several approaches, such as high
RF-LO isolation mixers [8], have been introduced to employ
dc coupling in radar sensors. However, these approaches are ei-
ther cumbersome to implement or do not completely remove dc
offsets and limit the dynamic range of the baseband amplifiers.
In this paper, a dc-coupled CW radar sensor was presented
to provide a noncontact and noninvasive approach for accu- Fig. 1. Motion-adaptive radiotherapy based on radar respiration sensing. The
rate respiration measurement. The radar sensor was designed process includes two steps: treatment preparation and treatment execution. In-
sets: (a) multiple radars, (b) beam-scanning radar, and (c) designed 2.4-GHz
with dc-coupled adaptive tuning architectures that include RF miniature radar sensor seating with a quarter.
coarse-tuning and baseband fine-tuning. The RF tuning was im-
plemented using a path of an attenuator and a phase shifter at the
RF front end of the radar sensor [9], [10]. It adds a portion of the includes two steps: treatment preparation, which consists of
transmitter signal to the receiver signal to cancel out most of the patient simulation and treatment planning, and treatment ex-
dc offset. To further calibrate the remaining dc offset, the base- ecution, which delivers radiation dose to the patient. At the
band fine-tuning architecture was used to adaptively adjust the patient simulation stage, the patient and tumor geometrical in-
amplifier bias to the desired level that allows both high gain am- formation is collected through computed tomography (CT) scan
plification and maximum dynamic range at the baseband stage. and then a 3-D patient model is built for the target tumor and
With the aforementioned dc tuning architectures, the radar sen- organs at risk [1], [2]. The patient’s breathing pattern is also
sor is able to precisely measure the low-frequency respiration examined at this stage. Those patients who cannot exhibit stable
motions with stationary moment. The radar sensor was tested in breathing patterns would be excluded from the motion-adaptive
the lab environment to demonstrate its ability of accurate dis- radiotherapy. Treatment planning is a virtual process that de-
placement measurement that preserves dc information of sta- signs the patient treatment using the patient model built at the
tionary moment. Moreover, the radar sensor was integrated and simulation stage. During the radiotherapy execution stage, a
tested with the linear accelerator (LINAC) to validate its clinical medical LINAC would be working together with two radar sen-
use. In order to achieve accurate radiation beam targeting using sors that dynamically monitor the chest wall and the abdomen
respiration measurement, a correlation model needs to be built to provide the real-time motion information. The LINAC could
and validated between the internal tumor target and external res- also be integrated with a radar sensor having beam-scanning
piration signal. This can be decoupled and is generally treated capability, shown as inset (b) in Fig. 1, which makes it pos-
as a separate issue from respiration measurement. In fact, var- sible to use one radar sensor to simultaneously measure the
ious approaches have been explored to infer the internal target breathing motions at multiple body locations [13]. In the third
position from external measurement [11], [12]. Therefore, this step, the advanced tumor tracking algorithm combines the chest
study has focused on the accurate measurement of respiration wall and abdomen motion information together with the pre-
in a noninvasive and noncontact way. collected patient model to extract the tumor locations in real
The radar motion-adaptive radiotherapy system will be in- time. Then, a controller utilizes the extracted tumor location
troduced in Section II. Section III discusses the dc-coupled information to control the LINAC to either perform gated ra-
radar sensor with tuning architectures. Experimental evalua- diotherapy or steer the radiation beam to track the tumor. The
tions would be presented in Section IV. A conclusion will be inset (c) shows the designed 2.4-GHz miniature radar sensor
drawn in Section V. with the size of 5 cm × 5 cm. The radar sensor was config-
ured with a ZigBee module for wireless data transmission,
which allows wireless monitoring of the respiration outside the
II. RADIOTHERAPY SYSTEM WITH RADAR SENSING
treatment room and relieves from a bunch of cables that may
The motion-adaptive radiotherapy system based on radar res- constrain the radar installation to the LINAC. The radar sen-
piration sensing is shown in Fig. 1. The radiotherapy process sor will be working in the arctangent-demodulated microwave
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING, VOL. 59, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2012 3119
Fig. 3. Block diagram of the dc-coupled radar sensor system with RF coarse-tuning and baseband fine-tuning architectures. The radar sensor is able to wirelessly
transmit data and receive command via the ZigBee protocols.
Fig. 10. Phantom motion measured by radar with the LINAC radiation beam
turned on, compared with the same phantom motion measured by Varian’s RPM
system.
Fig. 12. Radar measured gating platform motions with amplitudes of 20, 10,
and 5 mm, and periods of (a) 4 s, (b) 5 s, and (c) 6 s.
Fig. 11. (a) Radar measured respiration signal. (b) Generated gating signal.
The shaded area indicates the coach reference area, and the red line represents
the reference for gating.
TABLE I
ACCURACY OF THE RADAR MEASUREMENT FOR VARIOUS MOTION PATTERNS
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The authors would like to acknowledge the Cancer Prevention pp. 91–94.
Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) for the grant support, and
National Instruments/AWR for providing funding support as
well as RF instruments and design software.