A hybrid deformable model for simulating prostate brachytherapy

摘要

Ultrasound (US) guided prostate brachytherapy is a minimally invasive form of cancer treatment during which a needle is used to insert radioactive seeds into the prostate at pre-planned positions. Interaction with the needle can cause the prostate to deform and this can lead to inaccuracy in seed placement. Virtual reality (VR) simulation could provide a way for surgical residents to practice compensating for these deformations. To facilitate such a tool, we have developed a hybrid deformable model that combines ChainMail distance constraints with mass-spring physics to provide realistic, yet customizable deformations. Displacements generated by the model were used to warp a baseline US image to simulate an acquired US sequence. The algorithm was evaluated using a gelatin phantom with a Young's modulus approximately equal to that of the prostate (60 kPa). A 2D US movie was acquired while the phantom underwent needle insertion and inter-frame displacements were calculated using normalized cross correlation. The hybrid model was used to simulate the same needle insertion and the two sets of displacements were compared on a frame-by-frame basis. The average per-pixel displacement error was 0.210 mm. A simulation rate of 100 frames per second was achieved using a 1000 element triangular mesh while warping a 300x400 pixel US image on an AMD Athlon 1.1 Ghz computer with 1 GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon 9800 Pro graphics card. These results show that this new deformable model can provide an accurate solution to the problem of simulating real-time prostate brachytherapy.