An ultrasound guided monitoring system for high intensity focused ultrasound and radio frequency ablation therapies

Abstract

In accordance with the progress of the HIFU (High Intensity Focused Ultrasound) and RFA (Radio Frequency Ablation) treatments, the intensity of the focal lesion and the surrounding marginal area changes little by little. Here, it should be noted that the human eyes are very weak when the image takes a long time to change even if the image change from the start of the ablation treatment is large. To cope with those problems, we propose an ultrasound guided monitoring system to evaluate the progress of the ablation therapy quantitatively in order to secure the certain level of the monitoring during the HIFU and RFA therapies by reinforcing the lack of experience of medical doctors. Particularly, we propose a system to monitor and evaluate the intensity of the focal lesion and the intensity of the surrounding marginal area by tracking the position of the characteristic texture area near the focal lesion, which moves in accordance with the respiration. Our method to overlay the focal lesion and the surrounding marginal area on the ultrasound image is also effective in order not to miss the area to be treated. The experimental results during RFA ablation therapy shows the effectiveness of our constructed system.