Computer-aided detection (CAD) algorithms have been proposed for auto-detection of different types of cancer. CAD algorithms rely on machine learning methods to classify regions of interest in images into cancerous and healthy regions. In cancer screening, the foremost problem to solve is whether a patient has cancer, regardless of the location of cancerous regions in the organ. This allows early detection of the disease leading to a right course of action in terms of treatment to be taken. In machine learning, this problem has been formulated as multi-instance learning (MIL) where bags of instances are classified rather than the individual instances. In this paper, we propose a bag of bags (BoB) nested MIL algorithm where high-level bags (or parent bags), each contains multiple smaller bags of instances. We applied the proposed BoB MIL algorithm to prostate cancer detection problem using magnetic resonance imaging data to first detect which patients have cancer and consequently, to detect which slices in the 3D volume imaging data of the detected patients contain cancerous regions. Experimental results obtained from the imaging data of 30 patients with ground-truth data based on biopsy results show that the proposed algorithm is not only capable of detecting prostate cancer at patient level, it is also able to detect the cancerous regions at slice level of imaging data with high accuracy.

Diffusion weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MR) is a powerful tool in imaging-based prostate cancer screening and detection. Endorectal coils are commonly used in DW-MR imaging to improve the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the acquisition, at the expense of significant intensity inhomogeneities (bias field) that worsens as we move away from the endorectal coil. The presence of bias field can have a significant negative impact on the accuracy of different image analysis tasks, as well as prostate tumor localization, thus leading to increased inter- and intra-observer variability. Retrospective bias correction approaches are introduced as a more efficient way of bias correction compared to the prospective methods such that they correct for both of the scanner and anatomy-related bias fields in MR imaging. Previously proposed retrospective bias field correction methods suffer from undesired noise amplification that can reduce the quality of bias-corrected DW-MR image. Here, we propose a unified data reconstruction approach that enables joint compensation of bias field as well as data noise in DW-MR imaging. The proposed noise-compensated, bias-corrected (NCBC) data reconstruction method takes advantage of a novel stochastically fully connected joint conditional random field (SFC-JCRF) model to mitigate the effects of data noise and bias field in the reconstructed MR data. The proposed NCBC reconstruction method was tested on synthetic DW-MR data, physical DW-phantom as well as real DW-MR data all acquired using endorectal MR coil. Both qualitative and quantitative analysis illustrated that the proposed NCBC method can achieve improved image quality when compared to other tested bias correction methods. As such, the proposed NCBC method may have potential as a useful retrospective approach for improving the consistency of image interpretations.

A promising, recently explored, alternative to ultra-high b-value diffusion weighted imaging (UHB-DWI) is apparent ultra-high b-value diffusion-weighted image reconstruction (AUHB-DWR), where a computational model is used to assist in the reconstruction of apparent DW images at ultra-high b -values. Firstly, we present a novel approach to AUHB-DWR that aims to improve image quality. We formulate the reconstruction of an apparent DW image as a hidden conditional random field (HCRF) in which tissue model diffusion parameters act as hidden states in this random field. The second contribution of this paper is a new generation of fully connected conditional random fields, called the hidden stochastically fully connected conditional random fields (HSFCRF) that allows for efficient inference with significantly reduced computational complexity via stochastic clique structures. The proposed AUHB-DWR algorithms, HCRF and HSFCRF, are evaluated quantitatively in nine different patient cases using Fisher's criteria, probability of error, and coefficient of variation metrics to validate its effectiveness for the purpose of improving intensity delineation between expert identified suspected cancerous and healthy tissue within the prostate gland. The proposed methods are also examined using a prostate phantom, where the apparent ultra-high b-value DW images reconstructed using the tested AUHB-DWR methods are compared with real captured UHB-DWI. The results illustrate that the proposed AUHB-DWR methods has improved reconstruction quality and improved intensity delineation compared with existing AUHB-DWR approaches.

Prostate cancer is a leading cause of cancer death for men in the United States. Fortunately, the survival rate for early diagnosed patients is relatively high. Therefore, in vivo imaging plays an important role for the detection and treatment of the disease. Accurate prostate cancer localization with noninvasive imaging can be used to guide biopsy, radiotherapy, and surgery as well as to monitor disease progression. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) performed with an endorectal coil provides higher prostate cancer localization accuracy, when compared to transrectal ultrasound (TRUS). However, in general, a single type of MRI is not sufficient for reliable tumor localization. As an alternative, multispectral MRI, i.e., the use of multiple MRI-derived datasets, has emerged as a promising noninvasive imaging technique for the localization of prostate cancer; however almost all studies are with human readers. There is a significant inter and intraobserver variability for human readers, and it is substantially difficult for humans to analyze the large dataset of multispectral MRI. To solve these problems, this study presents an automated localization method using cost-sensitive support vector machines (SVMs) and shows that this method results in improved localization accuracy than classical SVM. Additionally, we develop a new segmentation method by combining conditional random fields (CRF) with a cost-sensitive framework and show that our method further improves cost-sensitive SVM results by incorporating spatial information. We test SVM, cost-sensitive SVM, and the proposed cost-sensitive CRF on multispectral MRI datasets acquired from 21 biopsy-confirmed cancer patients. Our results show that multispectral MRI helps to increase the accuracy of prostate cancer localization when compared to single MR images; and that using advanced methods such as cost-sensitive SVM as well as the proposed cost-sensitive CRF can boost the performance significantly when compared to SVM.

Prostate cancer is one of the leading causes of death from cancer among men in the United States. Currently, high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been shown to have higher accuracy than trans-rectal ultrasound (TRUS) when used to ascertain the presence of prostate cancer. As MRI can provide both morphological and functional images for a tissue of interest, some researchers are exploring the uses of multispectral MRI to guide prostate biopsies and radiation therapy. However, success with prostate cancer localization based on current imaging methods has been limited due to overlap in feature space of benign and malignant tissues using any one MRI method and the interobserver variability. In this paper, we present a new unsupervised segmentation method for prostate cancer detection, using fuzzy Markov random fields (fuzzy MRFs) for the segmentation of multispectral MR prostate images. Typically, both hard and fuzzy MRF models have two groups of parameters to be estimated: the MRF parameters and class parameters for each pixel in the image. To date, these two parameters have been treated separately, and estimated in an alternating fashion. In this paper, we develop a new method to estimate the parameters defining the Markovian distribution of the measured data, while performing the data clustering simultaneously. We perform computer simulations on synthetic test images and multispectral MR prostate datasets to demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the proposed method and also provide a comparison with some of the commonly used methods.