Radar motion sensing for accurate tumor tracking in radiation therapy

Tumor tracking is important for radiotherapy treatment of lung cancer to deliver sufficient radiation dose without damaging the surrounding healthy lung tissue and causing severe side effects such as pneumonitis. However, conventional tumor tracking methods are either invasive to the patients or do not have sufficient accuracy. Radar physiological motion sensing provides a noninvasive and yet accurate way to track tumor during radiotherapy. The detection theory, system setup, and experiments are discussed in this paper. A tumor tracking algorithm that extracts accurate tumor position information from radar measurement result is also presented.