Real-time moving organ tracking in ultrasound video based on a 3D organ model

Abstract

Image-guided therapy is the treatment technology which uses medical images to understand anatomic information on human body and make medical treatment plan. Such treatment includes radio frequency (RF) ablation, high intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU), cyber knife, surgical robot, etc. Especially, ultrasound (US) guided HIFU therapy has attracted much attention since it treats internal organs without giving any radiation dose to human body. However, it is still challengeable to track 3D position of tumors of moving organ from 2D us videos since respiration makes change on the position and shape of the internal organs such as liver, kidney or pancreas. The paper proposes a moving organ tracking method based on 3D organ model. The 3D organ model is made from MR or CT images captured before treatment. The 3D organ model is registered to US images, and the organ and its tumor's position are tracked in 2D US videos in real time. We apply the method on a liver phantom and get 5.3ms as the processing time and 1.3 mm as the accuracy.