A novel method for tumor localization and tracking in radiation therapy

Because the position of a tumor changes during radiation therapy (because of respiration or patient movements), real-time tumor tracking is necessary during radiation therapy in order to deliver a sufficient dose of radiation to the tumor without damaging the surrounding healthy tissues. In this paper, we propose a novel tumor positioning method based on spatial sparsity. We estimate the position by processing the received signals from only one implantable RF transmitter. The method is easier to implement, non-iterative, faster and more accurate compared to common magnetic transponder based methods. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method using Monte-Carlo simulation.