Visualization and evaluation of prostate needle biopsy

Abstract

Three-dimensional (3-D) computer visualization is playing an increasingly important role in mcdicnl imaging applications. Visualization is helpful and important because it provides more flexibility for medical education, training and pre-operative planning, and it offers a better method to evaluate schemes currently used in the clinical environment for their improvements and optimizations. We have developed a 3-D visualization system for prostate needle biopsy simulation. Surface models of the prostate are reconstructed from the digitized pathological tissue images of the real prostate specimens. The needle biopsy of the prostate can be visualized and simulated automatically by the system or interactively by a urologist with a 6 degree-of-frcedom (DOF) tracking device. This system has been used to validate the effectiveness of the automatic simulation for the evaluation of prostate needle biopsy. It has also been used to compare the performance of (he existing biopsy schcmes. In this paper, further experiments are conducted using this visualization system with a total of 107 reconstructed 3-D prostate surface models to evaluate the correlation between tumor volume and positive needle core volume. Preliminary experimental results are also given.