Performance and suitability assessment of a real-time 3D electromagnetic needle tracking system for interstitial brachytherapy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: Accurate insertion and overall needle positioning are key requirements for effective brachytherapy treatments. This work aims at demonstrating the accuracy performance and the suitability of the Aurora(®) V1 Planar Field Generator (PFG) electromagnetic tracking system (EMTS) for real-time treatment assistance in interstitial brachytherapy procedures. MATERIAL AND METHODS: The system's performance was characterized in two distinct studies. First, in an environment free of EM disturbance, the boundaries of the detection volume of the EMTS were characterized and a tracking error analysis was performed. Secondly, a distortion analysis was conducted as a means of assessing the tracking accuracy performance of the system in the presence of potential EM disturbance generated by the proximity of standard brachytherapy components. RESULTS: The tracking accuracy experiments showed that positional errors were typically 2 ± 1 mm in a zone restricted to the first 30 cm of the detection volume. However, at the edges of the detection volume, sensor position errors of up to 16 mm were recorded. On the other hand, orientation errors remained low at ± 2° for most of the measurements. The EM distortion analysis showed that the presence of typical brachytherapy components in vicinity of the EMTS had little influence on tracking accuracy. Position errors of less than 1 mm were recorded with all components except with a metallic arm support, which induced a mean absolute error of approximately 1.4 mm when located 10 cm away from the needle sensor. CONCLUSIONS: The Aurora(®) V1 PFG EMTS possesses a great potential for real-time treatment assistance in general interstitial brachytherapy. In view of our experimental results, we however recommend that the needle axis remains as parallel as possible to the generator surface during treatment and that the tracking zone be restricted to the first 30 cm from the generator surface.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".