Registration of In Vivo Prostate Magnetic Resonance Images to Digital Histopathology Images

Early and accurate diagnosis of prostate cancer enables minimally invasive therapies to cure the cancer with less morbidity. The purpose of this work is to non-rigidly register in vivo pre-prostatectomy prostate medical images to regionally-graded histopathology images from post-prostatectomy specimens, seeking a relationship between the multi parametric imaging and cancer distribution and aggressiveness. Our approach uses image-based registration in combination with a magnetically tracked probe to orient the physical slicing of the specimen to be parallel to the in vivo imaging planes, yielding a tractable 2D registration problem. We measured a target registration error of 0.85 mm, a mean slicing plane marking error of 0.7 mm, and a mean slicing error of 0.6 mm; these results compare favourably with our 2.2 mm diagnostic MR image thickness. Qualitative evaluation of in vivo imaging-histopathology fusion reveals excellent anatomic concordance between MR and digital histopathology.