| Abstract | Prostate cancer (PCa) is the third most common cancer in the world and becomes more prevalent with age. A total of 186,320 new prostate cancer cases and 28,660 deaths from cancer are projected to occur in the United States in 2008. Definitive diagnosis of PCa requires a biopsy, and transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) is often used to guide biopsy needle placement. However, TRUS guided biopsies often underestimate or fail to detect the presence of PCa, likely due to inadequate sampling of the prostate resulting from poor visualization of PCa with ultrasound (US). Approximately 10-25% of patients whose first TRUS biopsies were negative are later diagnosed with cancer. This sub-optimal detection performance can be attributed to the underestimation of the Gleason score, a measure of the cancer progression or can be attributed to the low quality images produced by US resulting in poor visualization of the PCa. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has been shown to be extremely sensitive and specific for the detection of prostate cancer. However, biopsy under MRI guidance is very difficult to achieve. If MRI images could be registered in real time to 3D TRUS images, the MRI images could be used to guide the biopsy, potentially reducing the rate of false negative biopsies guided by TRUS alone. The goal of this project is to characterize the registration accuracy between 2D T2-weighted (T2-w) MRI and 3D TRUS images. |
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