Prostate brachytherapy is a popular prostate cancer treatment option that involves the permanent implantation of radioactive seeds into the prostate.
However, contemporary brachytherapy procedure is limited by the lack of an imaging system that can provide real-time seed-position feedback. While many other imaging systems have been proposed, photoacoustic imaging has emerged as a potential ideal modality to address this need, since it could easily be incorporated into the current ultrasound system used in the operating room. We present such a photoacoustic imaging system built around a clinical ultrasound system to achieve the task of visualizing and localizing seeds. We performed several experiments to analyze the effects of various parameters on the appearance of brachytherapy seeds in photoacoustic images. We also imaged multiple seeds in an ex vivo dog prostate phantom to demonstrate the possibility of using this system in a clinical setting. Although still in its infancy, these initial results of a photoacoustic imaging system for the application of prostate brachytherapy seed localization are highly promising.
Written by:
Kuo N, Kang HJ, Song DY, Kang JU, Boctor EM. Are you the author?
Johns Hopkins University, Department of Biomedical Engineering, 3400 North Charles Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218.
Reference: J Biomed Opt. 2012 Jun;17(6):066005.
PubMed Abstract
PMID: 22734761
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