A Method on Detection and Location of the Ablation Needle in CT Images

In CT image-guided interventional surgery, the rapid and accurate location of an ablation needle plays a key role in clinical diagnosis and treatment, especially for the design of surgical navigation system. However, there is no universal and effective method for detection of line segment, especially for precise extraction of the features. Aiming at the ablation needle and its tip in CT images, we propose the detection and location method based on an improved Hough transform, where features are extracted using some prior information and the clustering algorithm. The proposed method effectively removes noise and improves the real-time and accuracy of calculation. The numerical simulation results show that some morphological information can be accurately extracted and located, such as the coordinates of the endpoints and the length of the needle.