Evaluation of intracavitary pneumatic actuators for prostate MR elastography

Tissue stiffness estimation using gaussian filters for prostate MR elastography

Introduction Manual palpation through digital rectal examination is an established method for prostate cancer screening. Unfortunately, the technique is highly subjective and has limited spatial resolution. Prostate MR Elastography (MRE) could address these shortcomings by mapping stiffness throughout the entire gland. Recent work suggests that intracavitary approaches using transurethral actua...

Evaluating the Feasibility of Multi-Slice Endorectal Magnetic Resonance Elastography for Prostate Cancer Localization

Introduction: The stiffness of malignant prostate tissue is elevated as compared to normal or benign tissue, which suggests that the biomechanical properties of prostate tissue may be an independent marker for prostate cancer. Using dynamic MR elastography, micrometer amplitude shear waves are propagated into tissue, and the resulting tissue displacements are measured to calculate the underlyin...

Patient-specific Deformation Modelling via Elastography: Application to Image-guided Prostate Interventions

Image-guided prostate interventions often require the registration of preoperative magnetic resonance (MR) images to real-time transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) images to provide high-quality guidance. One of the main challenges for registering MR images to TRUS images is how to estimate the TRUS-probe-induced prostate deformation that occurs during TRUS imaging. The combined statistical and biomec...

MR-Elastography of the prostate using an endorectal coil for actuation - a feasibility study

Hand Rehabilitation Device to Prevent Contracture for Finger Joints using Pneumatic Soft Actuators

There has been increased interest in use of pneumatic actuators in many fields, such as medical care and welfare. In particular, proposed pneumatic soft actuator with soft material has many advantages such as low mass, flexibility, safety and user-friendliness. We therefore focus on the pneumatic actuators as a drive source of a rehabilitation device. This paper describes the concept, design, p...