Elmer Soto1, Vaishali Karnik1,2, Igor Gyacskov2, Lori Gardi2, Tamie L. Poepping3,4, Gord John Campbell4,5, Aaron Fenster1,2, Charles Alexander McKenzie1,4
1Biomedical Engineering Graduate Program, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada; 2Imaging Research Laboratories, Robarts Research Institute, London, Ontario, Canada; 3Physics & Astronomy, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada; 4Department of Medical Biophysics, The University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada; 5Industrial Materials Institute - London, National Research Council Canada, London, Ontario, Canada
Trans-rectal ultrasound (TRUS) guided biopsies often underestimate or fail to detect the presence of prostate cancer (PCa). Fused MRI and 3D TRUS images have the potential to dramatically reduce the false negative rate of TRUS-guided biopsies. To validate the accu-racy of registering MR images to 3D TRUS images, a polyvinyl alcohol prostate phantom was constructed. MRI and TRUS images of the phantom were segmented and registered. The fiducial localization error and target registration error between corresponding mark-ers in the phantom was sufficiently small to suggest that our technique is accurate enough to guide prostate biopsies.