摘要:
A method and apparatus for three-dimensional imaging and treatment of a patient's body. The method and apparatus utilize a system (10) for developing a therapy plan for treatment of an organ of the patient, a device for generating ultrasound image data from a treatment region and a device for providing a translucent volume image of a portion of a patient's body and a separate translucent image of the patient organ and a three-dimensional viewing device to superimpose a translucent article image to enable viewing of the article image simultaneously with the patient organ, and a portion of the patient's body.
摘要:
A system for optimizing the planning, registration, targeting, and delivery of conformal, external beam radiation therapy of prostate cancer and other soft tissue diseases. Real-time ultrasound imaging during planning and treatment employing an ultrasound probe (41) is used for localization of soft tissue treatment targets and fused with radiographic or CT data for conformal treatment optimization. The fusion technique provides accurate localization of the prostate volume in real time. A spatial registration system (30,40) is used to track and record the relative spatial position of the ultrasound probe (41).
摘要:
An autosegmentation/autocontouring method that may be used for quickly and accurately contouring the regions and boundaries around regions for the development of cross sections that may be linearly disposed for the three-dimensional reconstruction of an image is described and claimed. The autosegmentation/autocontouring method includes at least four steps. The first step is to digitize a CT, MRI, or other suitable image and display it on a display screen. The two-dimensional image on the display screen will include gray-scale representations of the internal organs and tissue masses of the anatomical site through which the cross section was made. The second step is to select the interior of a ROI and draw a polygon within the boundaries of the cross-sectional view of this ROI. This polygon could also be drawn in the interior of a cancerous mass or other diseased tissue. The third step of the method of the present invention is to expand the polygon in a novel manner by iteratively testing pixels of the image on the display outside of, but adjacent to, the pixels that the polygon currently subtends. Pixels will be added to the polygon if the value of a decision rule function has a predetermined value. The expansion of the polygon is continued until none of the pixels at the perimeter of the polygon can satisfy the decision rule. Once it is found that none of the perimeter pixels satisfy the decision rule, the perimeter of the polygon is considered the boundary of the ROI. And the fourth step is that the boundary of the ROI is computed and a contour is developed based on this boundary. This same process is repeated for other ROIs that the user may select.
摘要:
A system and method for intravascular treatment planning and therapy on a patient. The system includes a structure for holding a treatment source, such as a radiation source, and also moving the treatment source through a patient's vascular system using a positioning device which includes a component to establish the location relative to a particular reference position. An imaging device is also disposed in association with a vascular treatment area and the treatment source to register the resulting image information, enabling formation of three dimensional image in real time for use by a clinician.
摘要:
A system and method for autofusion of three-dimensional ('3-D') image data volumes is described. According to the system and method, registration is effected by simultaneously displaying on a GUI at least, but preferably, two 3-D, image data volumes, and one of the 3-D image data volumes is held fixed while the other may be scaled, rotated, and translated to align homologous anatomic features. The system and method will simultaneously display the axial, sagittal, and coronal plane views of a region of a region of interest. These plane views will be of data volumes that are designed and configured for a system user to 'drag' or 'position' one volume to a new position in one plane view which will also simultaneously update the data volume in the other two plane views with no apparent lag time. The system and method also includes automated alignment computation based on mutual information (MI) maximization. The system and method aligns 3-D more efficiently and faster than prior image alignment methods.
摘要:
A method for determining the location of a biopsy needle within a target volume, said target volume being defined to be a space inside a patient, the method comprising: (1) generating a plurality of images of the target volume; (2) spatially registering the images; (3) generating a three-dimensional representation of the target volume from the spatially registered images; (4) determining the location of the biopsy needle in the three-dimensional target volume representation; and (5) correlating the determined biopsy needle location with the spatially registered images. Preferably, the present invention includes graphically displaying the target volume representation, the target volume representation including a graphical depiction of the determined biopsy needle location. Also disclosed herein is an inventive localization technique wherein a camera for tracking a reference target is attached to an ultrasound probe, thereby enabling precise localization of the probe in a coordinate system.
摘要:
A system and method is disclosed for automatically computing contours representing the boundaries of objects in three-dimensional tomographic images that may be formed by computed tomography ('CT'), magnetic resonance imaging ('MRI'), positron emission tomography ('PET'), single proton emission computed tomography ('SPECT'), or other appropriate methods. The system and method begin with a sample region of the object's interior and the single region is expanded in a stepwise fashion. At each step, a contour maximally matching the region's current edge, local gray-level gradient maxima, and prior contour shapes is determined. Upon completion of region expansion, the object contour is set to that step-contour having the maximum value of an objective function summing contributions from region edges, gradient edges, and prior shapes. Both the region expansion and the boundary contour determination are formulated such that there is a guaranteed average minimum error in the determination of the contours. This contour is represented as a parametric curve in which the contour size and shape are specified by the values of the parameters. These parameters are independant variables of the objective function. The parameters also are considered to be random variables capable of encoding a distribution of contour shapes, and by assuming a particular distribution, the contribution of shape constraints to the object function can be computed. The resulting contour corresponds to the set of parameters for which the objective function is a maximum.