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Updated: Mar 21, 2026

Use of MRI-ultrasound Fusion to Achieve Targeted Prostate Biopsy
Published on: April 9, 2019
Open-Source Platform for Prostate Motion Tracking During in-Bore Targeted MRI-Guided Biopsy
Peter A Behringer1, Christian Herz1, Tobias Penzkofer2
1Radiology, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, USA.
Abstract:
Accurate sampling of cancer suspicious locations is critical in targeted prostate biopsy, but can be complicated by the motion of the prostate. We present an open-source software for intra-procedural tracking of the prostate and biopsy targets using deformable image registration. The software is implemented in 3D Slicer and is intended for clinical users. We evaluated accuracy, computation time and sensitivity to initialization, and compared implementations that use different versions of the Insight Segmentation Toolkit (ITK). Our retrospective evaluation used data from 25 in-bore MRI-guided prostate biopsy cases (343 registrations total). Prostate Dice similarity coefficient improved on average by 0.17 (p < 0.0001, range 0.02-0.48). Registration was not sensitive to operator variability. Computation time decreased significantly for the implementation using the latest version of ITK. In conclusion, we presented a fully functional open-source tool that is ready for prospective evaluation during clinical MRI-guided prostate biopsy interventions.

