Eva Rothgang1, 2, Wesley D. Gilson2
1Pattern Recognition Lab, Department of Computer Science, Friedrich-Alexander University, Erlangen, Germany; 2Center for Applied Medical Imaging, Siemens Corporate Research, Baltimore, MD, United States
An increasing number of minimally-invasive percutaneous needle interventions is performed under MR guidance including biopsies, targeted drug delivery and thermal ablations. All of these procedures require the identification of a skin entry site for needle placement. Even though this sounds straightforward, it is often a time consuming process as the entry site is usually identified in an iterative fashion under real-time imaging using a fingertip or water-filled syringe. The method presented allows to rapidly, accurately, and reproducibly localize the skin entry site without the need for any additional imaging or hardware.