Biopsy needle tracking technique in US images

Abstract

Fast development of imaging techniques in last decades has offered the intra-operative visualization as the integral part of surgical tools. Therefore, on-going research activities still focus on efficient and robust analysis of ultrasound images. The paper meets these requirements targeting in detection of biopsy needle, estimation of the needle trajectory and tracking the needle tip motion inside the examined tissue. The developed novel method uses ultrasound data supported by elastography images. The investigated detection algorithm introduces Histogram of Oriented Gradients and image entropy, whereas the tracking part employs Hough transform, Gabor filter and Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi optical flow estimation technique. The developed methodology is verified by the stereoscopic navigation system. The verification phase proves the accuracy of 3-5mm and encourages the further improvement of the methods.

Keywords: Biopsy needle; Detection; Elastography; Gabor filter; Histogram of Oriented Gradients; Hough transform; Lucas–Kanade–Tomasi optical flow; Object tracking; Optical tracker; Ultrasound.