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ConVibNet: Needle Detection during Continuous Insertion via Frequency-Inspired Features

Jiamei Guo, Zhehao Duan, Maria Neiiendam, Dianye Huang, Nassir Navab, Zhongliang Jiang

TL;DR

ConVibNet advances real-time needle detection in ultrasound-guided interventions by integrating temporal correlation modeling with a novel intersection-and-difference loss, thereby improving accuracy and robustness and demonstrating high potential for integration into autonomous insertion systems.

Abstract

Purpose: Ultrasound-guided needle interventions are widely used in clinical practice, but their success critically depends on accurate needle placement, which is frequently hindered by the poor and intermittent visibility of needles in ultrasound images. Existing approaches remain limited by artifacts, occlusions, and low contrast, and often fail to support real-time continuous insertion. To overcome these challenges, this study introduces a robust real-time framework for continuous needle detection. Methods: We present ConVibNet, an extension of VibNet for detecting needles with significantly reduced visibility, addressing real-time, continuous needle tracking during insertion. ConVibNet leverages temporal dependencies across successive ultrasound frames to enable continuous estimation of both needle tip position and shaft angle in dynamic scenarios. To strengthen temporal awareness of needle-tip motion, we introduce a novel intersection-and-difference loss that explicitly leverages motion correlations across consecutive frames. In addition, we curated a dedicated dataset for model development and evaluation. Results: The performance of the proposed ConVibNet model was evaluated on our dataset, demonstrating superior accuracy compared to the baseline VibNet and UNet-LSTM models. Specifically, ConVibNet achieved a tip error of 2.80+-2.42 mm and an angle error of 1.69+-2.00 deg. These results represent a 0.75 mm improvement in tip localization accuracy over the best-performing baseline, while preserving real-time inference capability. Conclusion: ConVibNet advances real-time needle detection in ultrasound-guided interventions by integrating temporal correlation modeling with a novel intersection-and-difference loss, thereby improving accuracy and robustness and demonstrating high potential for integration into autonomous insertion systems.

ConVibNet: Needle Detection during Continuous Insertion via Frequency-Inspired Features

TL;DR

ConVibNet advances real-time needle detection in ultrasound-guided interventions by integrating temporal correlation modeling with a novel intersection-and-difference loss, thereby improving accuracy and robustness and demonstrating high potential for integration into autonomous insertion systems.

Abstract

Purpose: Ultrasound-guided needle interventions are widely used in clinical practice, but their success critically depends on accurate needle placement, which is frequently hindered by the poor and intermittent visibility of needles in ultrasound images. Existing approaches remain limited by artifacts, occlusions, and low contrast, and often fail to support real-time continuous insertion. To overcome these challenges, this study introduces a robust real-time framework for continuous needle detection. Methods: We present ConVibNet, an extension of VibNet for detecting needles with significantly reduced visibility, addressing real-time, continuous needle tracking during insertion. ConVibNet leverages temporal dependencies across successive ultrasound frames to enable continuous estimation of both needle tip position and shaft angle in dynamic scenarios. To strengthen temporal awareness of needle-tip motion, we introduce a novel intersection-and-difference loss that explicitly leverages motion correlations across consecutive frames. In addition, we curated a dedicated dataset for model development and evaluation. Results: The performance of the proposed ConVibNet model was evaluated on our dataset, demonstrating superior accuracy compared to the baseline VibNet and UNet-LSTM models. Specifically, ConVibNet achieved a tip error of 2.80+-2.42 mm and an angle error of 1.69+-2.00 deg. These results represent a 0.75 mm improvement in tip localization accuracy over the best-performing baseline, while preserving real-time inference capability. Conclusion: ConVibNet advances real-time needle detection in ultrasound-guided interventions by integrating temporal correlation modeling with a novel intersection-and-difference loss, thereby improving accuracy and robustness and demonstrating high potential for integration into autonomous insertion systems.
Paper Structure (10 sections, 3 equations, 4 figures, 3 tables)

This paper contains 10 sections, 3 equations, 4 figures, 3 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Methods
  3. Intersection and Difference Loss for Motion Correlations
  4. Data Preparation
  5. Experimental Setup
  6. Data Acquisition and Annotation Process
  7. Evaluation and Results
  8. Comparison Study
  9. Ablation Study
  10. Discussion and Conclusion

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: Frequency analysis of the US image sequence. (a) Selected pixel locations for analysis in the $t$-th frame, with the yellow transparent line indicating the needle at an insertion angle of 30°. (b)$\sim$(e) Spectrograms corresponding to the needle tip, shaft, surrounding tissue, and background.
  • Figure 2: Overview of the proposed method. (a) Architecture of ConVibNet. (b) Illustration of how the intersection and difference masks are computed.
  • Figure 3: Overview of the data acquisition workflow. (a) Hardware setup and connections (see Sec. \ref{['sec:expsetup']}). (b) US image sequence annotation process (see Sec. \ref{['sec:gtanno']}).
  • Figure 4: Example comparison of predicted segmentation and post-processed outputs