A positioning method of ablation needles in X-ray CT images

CT Image-guided interventional therapy has been widely used in clinical application, especially for cancer treatments. However, metal artifacts often appear in CT imaging of the metal ablation needles. These artifacts seriously affect the doctor's diagnosis of the ablation needle positioning. We propose an accurate positioning method which can correct the artifacts and detect the geometric information of ablation needles. Firstly, the layered technology of the multi-energy projection data is given to eliminate metal artifacts; then the corrected CT images are preprocessed for positioning; finally, the "pinpoint" positioning of the needles is realized by DBSCAN (Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise) clustering. The experimental results show that the proposed method can provide fast and accurate positioning for the ablation needle.