A statistical model-based technique for accounting for prostate gland deformation in endorectal coil-based MR imaging

Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2012:2012:5412-5. doi: 10.1109/EMBC.2012.6347218.

Abstract

In prostate brachytherapy procedures, combining high-resolution endorectal coil (ERC)-MRI with Computed Tomography (CT) images has shown to improve the diagnostic specificity for malignant tumors. Despite such advantage, there exists a major complication in fusion of the two imaging modalities due to the deformation of the prostate shape in ERC-MRI. Conventionally, nonlinear deformable registration techniques have been utilized to account for such deformation. In this work, we present a model-based technique for accounting for the deformation of the prostate gland in ERC-MR imaging, in which a unique deformation vector is estimated for every point within the prostate gland. Modes of deformation for every point in the prostate are statistically identified using a set of MR-based training set (with and without ERC-MRI). Deformation of the prostate from a deformed (ERC-MRI) to a non-deformed state in a different modality (CT) is then realized by first calculating partial deformation information for a limited number of points (such as surface points or anatomical landmarks) and then utilizing the calculated deformation from a subset of the points to determine the coefficient values for the modes of deformations provided by the statistical deformation model. Using a leave-one-out cross-validation, our results demonstrated a mean estimation error of 1mm for a MR-to-MR registration.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, N.I.H., Intramural

MeSH terms

  • Humans
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods*
  • Male
  • Prostate / abnormalities*
  • Prostatic Neoplasms / pathology*
  • Rectum