Transrectal electrical impedance tomography (TREIT) is a novel imaging modality being developed for prostate biopsy guidance and cancer characterization. We describe a novel fused-data TREIT (fd-TREIT) system and approach developed to improve imaging robustness and evaluate it on challenging clinically-representative phantoms. The new approach incorporates 8 electrodes (in 2 rows) on a biopsy probe (BP) and 12 electrodes on the face of a transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) probe and includes a biopsy gun, instrument tracking, 3D-printed needle guide, and EIT hardware and software. The approach was evaluated via simulation, a series of prostate-shaped gel phantoms, and an ex vivo bovine tissue sample using only absolute reconstructions. The simulations surprisingly found that using only biopsy-probe electrode measurements, i.e. omitting TRUS-probe electrode measurements, significantly improves robustness to noise thus leading to simpler modeling and significant decreases in computational times (~13x speed-up/reconstructions in ~27 minutes). The gel phantom experiments resulted in reconstructions with area under the curve (AUC) values extracted from receiver operator characteristic curves of >0.85 for 4 out of the 5 tests, and when incorporating inclusion boundaries resulted in absolute reconstructions yielding 1.9% and 12.2% average percent errors for 3 consistent tests and all 5 tests, respectively. Ex vivo bovine tests revealed qualitatively that the fd-TREIT approach can largely discriminate a complex adipose and muscle interface in a realistic setting using data from 9 biopsy probe states (biopsy core locations). The algorithms developed here on challenging phantoms suggest strong promise for this technology to aid in imaging during routine 12-core biopsies.

中文翻译：

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仅使用活检探针电极对融合数据 TREIT 进行的幻像研究。

经直肠电阻抗断层扫描 (TREIT) 是一种新型成像方式，正在开发用于前列腺活检指导和癌症表征。我们描述了一种新的融合数据 TREIT (fd-TREIT) 系统和方法，旨在提高成像鲁棒性并在具有挑战性的临床代表性幻影上对其进行评估。新方法在活检探头 (BP) 上包含 8 个电极（2 行）和经直肠超声 (TRUS) 探头表面上的 12 个电极，包括活检枪、仪器跟踪、3D 打印针导和 EIT 硬件和软件。该方法通过模拟、一系列前列腺形凝胶体模和仅使用绝对重建的离体牛组织样本进行评估。模拟令人惊讶地发现，仅使用活检探针电极测量，即 省略 TRUS 探针电极测量，显着提高了对噪声的鲁棒性，从而导致更简单的建模和计算时间的显着减少（~27 分钟内~13 倍加速/重建）。凝胶体模实验导致重建，曲线下面积 (AUC) 值从 5 次测试中的 4 次的接收者操作特征曲线中提取 > 0.85，并且当合并包含边界时导致绝对重建产生 1.9% 和 12.2% 的平均百分比分别为 3 个一致测试和所有 5 个测试的错误。体外牛试验定性地表明，fd-TREIT 方法可以使用来自 9 个活检探针状态（活检核心位置）的数据在现实环境中很大程度上区分复杂的脂肪和肌肉界面。