Seed Localization Using Trus and Gre Based Gaussian Fil Tering For Brachytherapy Applications

In this paper, we propose a novel algorithm for detecting needles and their corresponding implanted radioactive seed locations in the prostate during brachytherapy from transrectal ultrasound images. This is carried out efficiently using separable Gaussian filters in a probabilistic Gibbs random field framework. An approximation of the needle path through the prostate volume is obtained using a polynomial fit. The seeds are then detected and assigned to their corresponding needles by calculating local maxima. In our experiments, we were able to successfully localize over 85% of the implanted seeds