Skip to main content

Advertisement

Log in

Abstract

Purpose

In prostate brachytherapy, intraoperative dosimetry would allow for evaluation of the implant quality while the patient is still in treatment position. Such a mechanism, however, requires 3-D visualization of the deposited seeds relative to the prostate. It follows that accurate and robust seed segmentation is of critical importance in achieving intraoperative dosimetry.

Methods

Implanted iodine brachytherapy seeds are segmented via a region-based implicit active contour model. Overlapping seed groups are then resolved using a template-based declustering technique.

Results

Ground truth seed coordinates were obtained through manual segmentation. A total of 57 clinical C-arm images from 10 patients were used to validate the proposed algorithm. This resulted in two failed images and a 96.0% automatic detection rate with a corresponding 2.2% false-positive rate in the remaining 55 images. The mean centroid error between the manual and automatic segmentations was 1.2 pixels.

Conclusions

Robust and accurate iodine seed segmentation can be achieved through the proposed segmentation workflow.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Chan TF, Vese LA: Active contours without edges. IEEE Trans Image Process 10(2), 266–277 (2001)

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  2. Dehghan E, Jain A, Moradi M, Wen X, Morris WJ, Fichtinger G, Salcudean SE: Brachytherapy seed reconstruction with joint-encoded C-arm single-axis rotation and motion compensation. Med Image Anal 15(5), 760–771 (2011)

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  3. Hoskin P, Coyle C: Radiotherapy in Practice—Brachytherapy. Radiotherapy in Practice Series. Oxford University Press, Oxford (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Jemal A, Bray F, Center MM, Ferlay J, Ward E, Forman D: Global cancer statistics. CA Cancer J Clin 61(2), 69–90 (2011)

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  5. Kirsch RA: Computer determination of the constituent structure of biological images. Comp Biomed Res 4, 315–328 (1971)

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Kuo N, Deguet A, Song DY, Burdette EC, Prince JL, Lee J: Automatic segmentation of radiographic fiducial and seeds from X-ray images in prostate brachytherapy. Med Eng Phys 34(1), 64–77 (2012)

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  7. Lam S, Marks RJ, Cho PS: Prostate brachytherapy seed segmentation using spoke transform. SPIE 4322, 1490–1500 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Lee J, Labat C, Jain AK, Song DY, Burdette EC, Fichtinger G, Prince JL: REDMAPS: reduced-dimensionality matching for prostate brachytherapy seed reconstruction. IEEE Trans Med Image 30(1), 38–51 (2011)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Li C, Xu C, Gui C, Fox MD: Level set evolution without re-initialization: a new variational formulation. CVPR 1, 430–436 (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Li C, Kao C, Gore JC, Ding Z: Minimization of region-scalable fitting energy for image segmentation. IEEE Trans Image Process 17(10), 1940–1949 (2008)

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  11. Nag S, Ciezki JP, Cormack R, Doggett S, DeWyngaert K, Edmundson GK, Stock RG, Stone NN, Yu Y, Zelefsky M: Intraoperative planning and evaluation of permanent prostate brachytherapy: report of the American Brachytherapy Society. Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys 51(5), 1422 (2001)

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  12. Osher S, Sethian JA: Fronts propagating with curvature dependent speed: algorithms based on Hamilton-Jacobi formulations. J Comput Phys 79(1), 12–49 (1988)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Su Y, Davis BJ, Herman M, Manduca A, Robb R: Examination of dosimetry accuracy as a function of seed detection rate in permanent prostate brachytherapy. Med Phys 32, 3049–3056 (2001)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  14. Tubic D, Zaccarin A, Beaulieu L, Pouliot J: Automated seed detection and three-dimensional reconstruction. I. seed localization from fluoroscopic images or radiographs. Med Phys 28(11), 2272–2279 (2001)

    Article  PubMed  CAS  Google Scholar 

  15. Weeratunga SK, Kamath C: Investigation of implicit active contours for scientific image segmentation. VCIP 5308(1), 210–221 (2004)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Pascal Fallavollita.

Additional information

E. Moult was supported by the NSERC USRA program. G. Fichtinger was supported as a Cancer Care Ontario Research Chair.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Moult, E., Fichtinger, G., Morris, W.J. et al. Segmentation of iodine brachytherapy implants in fluoroscopy. Int J CARS 7, 871–879 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-012-0679-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-012-0679-4

Keywords

Navigation