Real-Time FEM-Based Registration of 3-D to 2.5-D Transrectal Ultrasound Images

We present a novel technique for real-time deformable registration of 3-D to 2.5-D transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) images for image-guided, robot-assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy (RALRP). For RALRP, a pre-operatively acquired 3-D TRUS image is registered to thin-volumes comprised of consecutive intra-operative 2-D TRUS images, where the optimal transformation is found using a gradient descent method based on analytical first and second order derivatives. Our method relies on an efficient algorithm for real-time extraction of arbitrary slices from a 3-D image deformed given a discrete mesh representation. We also propose and demonstrate an evaluation method that generates simulated models and images for RALRP by modeling tissue deformation through patient-specific finite-element models (FEM). We evaluated our method on in-vivo data from 11 patients collected during RALRP and focal therapy interventions. In the presence of an average landmark deformation of 3.89 and 4.62 mm, we achieved accuracies of 1.15 and 0.72 mm, respectively, on the synthetic and in-vivo data sets, with an average registration computation time of 264 ms, using MATLAB on a conventional PC. The results show that the real-time tracking of the prostate motion and deformation is feasible, enabling a real-time augmented reality-based guidance system for RALRP.]