Intra-procedure Deformable Ultrasound-MRI Fusion for Prostate Biopsies

This proposal is a collaborative effort between Yale University and the medical device company Eigen to develop a more robust and accurate method for the deformable fusion of pre-operative magnetic resonance images (MRI) and intra-procedure trans-rectal ultrasound (TRUS) images to guide prostate biopsy. Prostate cancer is a major cause of death in the U.S. and biopsy is the gold-standard for its diagnosis. Each year over 1.1 million biopsies are performed in the U.S. alone at a cost of well over 1 billion.Most of these biopsies are performed under TRUS guidance in a systematic fashion but blinded to potential tumor locations because many tumors are invisible on ultrasound. This procedure is highly inefficient and as many as 30% of serious tumors may be missed on a first-time biopsy. Multi-parametric MRI (mpMRI) acquired before the biopsy can be used to define potential targets and then used in conjunction with live TRUS imaging to perform targeted image-guided biopsy. A key challenge is the accurate regist