Acquiring localization of permanent radioactive sources (1-125) in prostate brachytherapy

Prostate brachytherapy has become an increasingly popular treatment for early stage prostate cancer. The accuracy of treatment planning for prostate brachytherapy depends on how accurately the radioactive seed sources are localized. In order to make an accurate treatment plan, the positions of the radioactive seed sources must be accurate. The proposed method of this study was to accurately acquire localization of the seed sources from little projection data (6, 9, and 18 views) with iterative reconstruction algorithms for transmission tomography. The results obtained by experimental study showed that the locations of dummy seeds were accurately observed with a reconstructed image with little projection data (about 9 views) and overlapping seeds were completely separated.