Non-rigid MRI/CT registration for effective planning of prostate brachytherapy

Prostate brachytherapy is an intraoperative radiotherapy technique for irradiating prostate tumors by placing radioactive sources inside the prostate. CT image is used to calculate a personalized dose distribution (PDD) while the MRI is used to visualize the tumor and the organs at risk. Therefore, a registration of preoperative MRI and CT is essential since it could improve the overall precision of the treatment planning, the placement of radioactive sources inside the prostate as well as the visualization of the dose distribution with respect to the tumor. This registration should compensate for prostate deformations due to changes in size and form between the acquisitions of each modality. In this paper, we present an intensity-based non-rigid registration method that does not require any manual segmentation or visual identification of landmarks. This method is based on the maximization of the mutual information in combination with a deformation field parameterized by cubic B-Spline. The method was validated on clinical patient datasets; the preliminary evaluation shows encouraging results that satisfy the desired clinical accuracy.