High-dose-rate brachytherapy is an accepted standard-of-care treatment for prostate cancer. In this procedure, catheters are inserted using three-dimensional (3D) transrectal ultrasound image-guidance. Their positions are manually segmented for treatment planning and delivery. The transverse ultrasound sweep, which is subject to tip and depth error for catheter localization, is a commonly used ultrasound imaging option available for image acquisition. We propose a two-step pipeline that uses a deep-learning network and curve fitting to automatically localize and model catheters in transversely reconstructed 3D ultrasound images. In the first step, a 3D U-Net was trained to automatically segment all catheters in a 3D ultrasound image. Following this step, curve fitting was implemented to detect the shapes of individual catheters using polynomial fitting. Of the 343 catheters (from 20 patients) in the testing data, the pipeline detected 320 (93.29%) with 7 false positives (2.04%) and 13 false negatives (3.79%). The average distance± one standard deviation between the ground truth and predictions for each catheter shaft was 1.9 ± 0.3 mm. The average difference of each catheter tip was 3.0 ± 0.4 mm. The proposed pipeline provides a method for reducing time spent on verification of catheter positions, minimizing uncertainties, and improving clinical workflow during the procedure. Reducing human variability in catheter placement predictions may increase the accuracy of tracking and radiation dose modelling.
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