Radioactive seed localization is an essential step in quantifying the dose delivered to the prostate and surrounding anatomy after low-dose-rate prostate cancer brachytherapy. Currently, dosimetrists spend hours manually localizing the radioactive seeds in postoperative images. In this work, we investigated a novel sliding-window convolutional neural network approach for automatically identifying and localizing the seeds in MR images. The method doesn’t rely on prior knowledge of the number of seeds implanted, strand placements, or needle-loading configurations. In initial testing, the proposed approach achieved a recall of 100%, precision of 97%, and processing time of ~0.5-1.5 minutes per patient.
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