TRANSRECTAL ULTRASOUND PROSTATE BIOPSY TRACKING WITH EFFICIENT AND ACCURATE DEFORMATION ESTIMATION

Prostate cancer is the most frequent cancer for men and the second cause of cancer death. Confin-nation of cancer requires transirectal prostate biopsies. Tracking systems for transrectal prostate biopsies make it possible to generate biopsy distribution maps for intra- and post-interventional quality control, 3D visualisation of histological results for treatment planning, and to guide clinicians toward non-ultrasound (US) targets. In this paper, a 3D US based tracking system for fast and accurate estimation of nonlinear prostate tissue deformation is proposed. Linear elasticity and inverse consistency a priori models are used to improve performance. A variant of the SSD image distance measure is proposed for filtering of local intensity shifts, which are frequent in US images. System accuracy was evaluated to 0.83 +/- 0.54 mm using point fiducial on 295 US volumes from 18 patients.