Automated seed localization for intraoperative prostate brachytherapy based on 3D line segment patterns
Mingyue Ding, Zhouping Wei, Dónal B. Downey, Aaron Fenster · Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE · 2005
Transrectal ultrasound (TRUS)-guided brachytherapy is a treatment option for localized prostate cancer, in which 125I or 103Pd radioactive seeds are implanted into the prostate. In this procedure, automated seed localization is important for intra-operative evaluation of dose delivery, which permits the identification of under-dosed regions and remedial seed placement, and ensures that the entire prostate receives the prescribed dose. In this paper, we describe the development of an automated seed segmentation method for use with 3D TRUS images. It is composed of five steps: 1) 3D needle segmentation; 2) volume cropping along the detected needle; 3) non-seed structure removal based on tri-bar model projection; 4) seed candidate recognition using 3D line segment detection; and 5) localization of seed positions. Experiments with the agar and chicken phantom images demonstrated that our method could segment 93% of the seeds in the 3D TRUS images with a mean distance error of 1.0 mm in an agar phantom and 1.7 mm in a chicken phantom, both with respect to manual segmented seed positions. The false positive rate was 7% while the segmentation time on a PC computer with dual AMD Athlon 1.8GHz processor was 280 seconds.