Detection of Prostate Cancer Using Radial/Axial Scanning of 2D Trans-rectal Ultrasound Images

Abstract

The search for improvement in the result of segmentation of regions of interest in medical images has continued to be a source of challenge to researchers. Several research efforts have gone in to delineate regions of interest in the prostate gland from Trans-rectal ultrasound (TRUS) 2D-images. In this work, we develop a fast algorithm based on radial/axial scanning of the pixels of the prostate gland image with the goal of detecting hyper-echoic pixels that are bound within the boundaries of the gland TRUS 2D-images. The algorithm implements expert knowledge and utilizes the features extracted from the intensity of the TRUS images, primarily the relative intensity and gradient to delineate region of interest. It employs radial/axial scanning of the image from common seed point automatically selected to detect the region of the gland and subsequently hyper-echoic pixels which indicate suspected cancerous tissue cites. Evaluation of the algorithm performance was done by comparing detection result with that of expert radiologists. The detection algorithm gave an average accuracy of 88.55% and sensitivity of 71.65%.