2023/05/31 by Muhammad Imran, Imran, Muhammad, Brianna Nguyen +19
Computer Science · Medicine · #AI in cancer detection #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Image and Video Processing (eess.IV) #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Prostate Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment #Radiomics and Machine Learning in Medical Imaging #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2305.19939
openalex publication_date 2023/05/31 · openalex created_date 2023/06/02 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Early diagnosis of prostate cancer significantly improves a patient's 5-year survival rate. Biopsy of small prostate cancers is improved with image-guided biopsy. MRI-ultrasound fusion-guided biopsy is sensitive to smaller tumors but is underutilized due to the high cost of MRI and fusion equipment. Micro-ultrasound (micro-US), a novel high-resolution ultrasound technology, provides a cost-effective alternative to MRI while delivering comparable diagnostic accuracy. However, the interpretation of micro-US is challenging due to subtle gray scale changes indicating cancer vs normal tissue. This challenge can be addressed by training urologists with a large dataset of micro-US images containing the ground truth cancer outlines. Such a dataset can be mapped from surgical specimens (histopathology) onto micro-US images via image registration. In this paper, we present a semi-automated pipeline for registering in vivo micro-US images with ex vivo whole-mount histopathology images. Our pipeline begins with the reconstruction of pseudo-whole-mount histopathology images and a 3-dimensional (3D) micro-US volume. Each pseudo-whole-mount histopathology image is then registered with the corresponding axial micro-US slice using a two-stage approach that estimates an affine transformation followed by a deformable transformation. We evaluated our registration pipeline using micro-US and histopathology images from 18 patients who underwent radical prostatectomy. The results showed a Dice coefficient of 0.94 and a landmark error of 2.7 mm, indicating the accuracy of our registration pipeline. This proof-of-concept study demonstrates the feasibility of accurately aligning micro-US and histopathology images. To promote transparency and collaboration in research, we will make our code and dataset publicly available.