Ultrasonography (US) has been most commonly used imaging modality for guidance of percutaneous interventional procedures such as biopsy or local ablation therapy of focal hepatic lesions because of its well-known advantages including real-time guidance, no radiation hazard, easy accessibility, and low cost.1-5 However, small focal hepatic lesions are sometimes difficult to accurately localize with US because they often have poor conspicuity on US. 4,6,7 This issue draws more attention since small focal hepatic lesions are more frequently detected with the use of state-of-the art computed...

Patients and Enrollment Criteria The study protocol was approved by the institutional review board of Samsung Medical Center, and all patients gave written informed consent before being enrolled. From June 2014 to September 2014, 20 patients who referred to our department for planning US of biopsy or radiofrequency ablation (RFA) of focal hepatic lesions were enrolled in our study. The inclusion criteria were as follows: a) patients referred for planning US of RFA for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) or for US-guided biopsy of focal hepatic lesions;...

Registration Error of Image Fusion Manual image fusion was successful for all 20 patients whereas automatic image fusion performed by the less-experienced radiologist was failed for one case due to improper feature extraction by the system. The details of image fusion between manual and automatic methods are summarized in Table 1. The quality of image fusion was not different between manual (Fig. 4) and automatic methods (Fig. 5) in both the expert and less-experienced radiologists (p = 1.000 and p = 0.317, respectively). The number...

Since image fusion between real-time US and pre-procedural CT or MR images can be difficult for less-experienced operators, automatic image fusion has been developed by some US vendors in recent years. Although automatic image fusion between real-time US and pre-procedural CT images has been introduced,18 it should also work with pre-procedural MR images. This is because MR images generally have been preferred as a reference data set over CT images for fusion imaging since MR images provide higher contrast than CT images between the liver...

Ah Yeong Kim, M.D., Min Woo Lee, M.D., Hyo Keun Lim, M.D. Department of Radiology and Center for Imaging Science, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine Young-Taek Oh, Ph.D.,Jung-Bae Kim, Ph.D., Won-Chul Bang, Ph.D. SAIT, SEC, 130 Samsung-ro, Yeongtong-gu, Suwon-si, Gyeonggi-do, Korea Dong Kuk Shin, M.S., Sung Jin Choi, M.S., Dalkwon Koh, M.S. Infrastructure Technology Lab, R&D Center, Samsung Medison, Korea Corresponding author: Min Woo Lee, M.D. Department of Radiology and Center for Imaging Science, Samsung Medical Center, Sungkyunkwan University School of Medicine,...

1. Lencioni R, Cioni D, Crocetti L, et al. Early-stage hepatocellular carcinoma in patients with cirrhosis: long-term results of percutaneous image-guided radiofrequency ablation. Radiology. 2005;234:961-967. 2. Rhim H, Lee MH, Kim YS, et al. Planning sonography to assess the feasibility of percutaneous radiofrequency ablation of hepatocellular carcinomas. AJR Am J Roentgenol. 2008;190:1324-1330. 3. Lencioni R, Crocetti L, Cioni D, et al. Percutaneous radiofrequency ablation of hepatic colorectal metastases: technique, indications, results, and new promises. Invest Radiol. 2004;39:689-697. 4. Lee MW, Rhim H, Cha DI, et...