A 3d Ultrasound-based Tracking System for Prostate Biopsy Distribution Quality Insurance

In this chapter we first discuss the clinical context of this work: the anatomy and the function of the prostate are introduced, followed by a brief overview on prostate cancer and prostatic cancer distribution, and also the current standard approaches in diagnosis and therapy. Crucial for the understanding of this work is the discussion on prostate motion and deformation that occur during therapeutic and diagnostical interventions. In the second section, prostate biopsies under 2D transrectal ultrasound, the case study of this work, is presented in detail, followed by a discussion on the insufficiencies of this method. Prostate biopsy tracking and guidance is presented as a solution to these insufficiencies in the following section, where the state of the art in this domain is presented. Finally, we give an overview on the method that we propose in this work to solve the tracking and guidance problem, a 3D ultrasound-based elastic prostate tracking system. te l-0 03 32 73 0, v er si on 1 21 O ct 2 00 8