Improved accuracy of ultrasound-guided therapies using electromagnetic tracking: in-vivo speed of sound measurements

摘要

The speed of sound (SOS) for ultrasound devices used for imaging soft tissue is often calibrated to water, 1540 m/s', despite in-vivo soft tissue SOS varying from 1450 to 1613 m/s~2. Images acquired with 1540 m/s and used in conjunction with stereotactic external coordinate systems can thus result in displacement errors of several millimeters. Ultrasound imaging systems are routinely used to guide interventional thermal ablation and cryoablation devices, or radiation sources for brachytherapy~3. Brachytherapy uses small radioactive pellets, inserted interstitially with needles under ultrasound guidance, to eradicate cancerous tissue~4. Since the radiation dose diminishes with distance from the pellet as 1 /r~2, imaging uncertainty of a few millimeters can result in significant erroneous dose delivery~(5,6). Likewise, modeling of power deposition and thermal dose accumulations from ablative sources are also prone to errors due to placement offsets from SOS errors7. This work presents a method of mitigating needle placement error due to SOS variances without the need of ionizing radiation~(2,8). We demonstrate the effects of changes in dosimetry in a prostate brachytherapy environment due to patient- specific SOS variances and the ability to mitigate dose delivery uncertainty. Electromagnetic (EM) sensors embedded in the brachytherapy ultrasound system provide information regarding 3D position and orientation of the ultrasound array. Algorithms using data from these two modalities are used to correct b- mode images to account for SOS errors. While ultrasound localization resulted in >3 mm displacements, EM resolution was verified to <1 mm precision using custom-built phantoms with various SOS, showing ~1% accuracy in SOS measurement.