A High-Precision US-Guided Robot-Assisted HIFU Treatment System for Breast Cancer

Breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women. A strong treatment candidate is high- intensity focused ultrasound （HIFU）, a non-invasive therapeutic method that has already demonstrated its promise. To improve the precision and lower the cost of HIFU treatment, our group has developed an ultrasound （US）-guided, five-degree-of-freedom （DOF）, robot-assisted HIFU system. We constructed a fully functional prototype enabling easy three-dimensional （3D） US image reconstruction, target seg-mentation, treatment path generation, and automatic HIFU irradiation. The position was calibrated using a wire phantom and the coagulated area was assessed on heterogeneous tissue phantoms. Under the US guidance, the centroids of the HIFU-ahlated area deviated by less than 2 mm from the planned treatment region. The overshoot around the planned region was well below the tolerance of clinical usage. Our system is considered to he sufficiently accurate for breast cancer treatment.

乳腺癌是女性中最常见的癌症。高强度聚焦超声(波)(HIFU)是一种很有前景的非介入式治疗方法。为了提高HIFU治疗的精确度和降低治疗成本,开发了一套基于超声引导(US)的五自由度辅助HIFU系统。搭建了一套功能齐全的样机,它可以轻松地实现三维超声图像重建、目标分割、治疗路径生成和HIFU自动照射等功能。利用线模型实现点定位,并且在异构组织模型上对凝固区域进行评估。在超声引导下,HIFU治疗区域的中心偏离目标治疗区域中心不到2 mm。规划治疗区域周围出现的超调值远低于在临床使用的允许值。对于乳腺癌的治疗,本系统有足够的准确性。