2D/3D Deep Registration Along Trajectories With Spatiotemporal Context: Application to Prostate Biopsy Navigation

The accuracy of biopsy targeting is a major issue for prostate cancer diagnosis and therapy. However, navigation to biopsy targets remains challenging due to the limitations of transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) guidance added to prostate motion issues. This article describes a rigid 2D/3D deep registration method, which provides a continuous tracking of the biopsy location w.r.t the prostate for enhanced navigation.

A spatiotemporal registration network (SpT-Net) is proposed to localize the live 2D US image relatively to a previously aquired US reference volume. The temporal context relies on prior trajectory information based on previous registration results and probe tracking. Different forms of spatial context were compared through inputs (local, partial or global) or using an additional spatial penalty term. The proposed 3D CNN architecture with all combinations of spatial and temporal context was evaluated in an ablation study. For providing a realistic clinical validation, a cumulative error was computed through series of registrations along trajectories, simulating a complete clinical navigation procedure. We also proposed two dataset generation processes with increasing levels of registration complexity and clinical realism.

The experiments show that a model using local spatial information combined with temporal information performs better than more complex spatiotemporal combination.

The best proposed model demonstrates robust real-time 2D/3D US cumulated registration performance on trajectories. Those results respect clinical requirements, application feasibility, and they outperform similar state-of-the-art methods.

Our approach seems promising for clinical prostate biopsy navigation assistance or other US image-guided procedure.