CT ACR is a fast technology to detect implanted catheters in computer tomography image data sets. CT ACR works for plastic as well as metal catheters, the detection process takes only a few seconds. The recognized catheters can afterwards be adapted by the user by supplying additional information e.g. the free needle length being the length of the needle that is outside of the template (if a a template is used) or outside the body (in case of free positioned catheters or if the template was removed after implantation).

If a template is used to insert the catheters, than the position of the reconstructed template as well as the information which template holes hold catheters can be used to run CT ACR.

Example showing the import of the template loading and running tpl based CT ACR

In case that no tempalte is used, or the template was not reconstructed, the simplest use of CT ACR is by defining a rectangle on an arbitrary plane that cuts the catheters as circles and specify the number of catheters that are to be found in this area.
 

 Example with 19 plastic catheters demonstrating the entering of implanted catheters, definition of the area, and execution of CT ACR
 

 As before, but with 4 metal catheters

If it is not possible to easily define such an area, the user can instead define for each catheter a so-called starting point and let the algorithm detect the catheters based on this input.
 

Example of CT ACR for image data set with plastic catheters for startpoints reconstruction method

The first commercial release of CT ACR was launched with Nucletron's Oncentra Prostate version 3.0 in 2007.