Derek Gillies
Derek Gillies received his honours BSc in Medical Physics from the University of Windsor. He is currently in the third year of his CAMPEP accredited PhD in Medical Biophysics at Western under the supervision of Dr. Aaron Fenster. It is expected that 1 in 7 Canadian men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in their life. Three-dimensional (3D) transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) fused with a magnetic resonance image (MRI) is used to guide prostate biopsy and aims to provide intraoperative needle guidance to suspicious cancer tissues identified using MRI. Currently, 3D TRUS-MR guided biopsy suffers from image and target misalignment caused by motion due to patient shifting or prostate deformation from the TRUS transducer. Therefore, my project is to develop and implement a real-time motion compensation algorithm that aligns the live 2D TRUS images with the 3D TRUS. This work is significant since a decrease in alignment error would allow for more accurate placement of biopsy needles, which increases the likelihood of correctly sampling the intended tissues suspicious of prostate cancer.
