A Combined Statistical and Biomechanical Model for Estimation of Intra-operative Prostate Deformation

An approach for estimating the deformation of the prostate caused by transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) probe insertion is presented. This work is particularly useful during brachytherapy procedures, in which planning for radioactive seed insertion is performed on preoperative scans, and significant deformation of the prostate can occur during the procedure. The approach makes use of a patient specific biomechanical model to run simulations for TRUS probe insertion, extract the main modes of the deformation of the prostate, and use this information to establish a deformable registration between 2 orthogonal cross-sectional ultrasound images and the preoperative prostate. In the work presented here, the approach is tested on an anatomy-realistic biomechanical phantom for the prostate and results are reported for 5 test simulations. More than 73% of maximum deformation of the prostate was recovered, with the estimation error mostly attributed to the relatively small number of biomechanical simulations used for training.