Computer aided diagnosis of prostate cancer with magnetic resonance imaging

_____________________________________________________________________________________ A novel automated computerized scheme has been developed for determining a likelihood measure of ma­ lignancy for cancer suspicious regions in the prostate based on dynamic contrast-enhanced MRI (DCE-MRI) images. Our database consisted of 34 consecutive patients with histologically proven adenocarcinoma in the peripheral zone of the prostate. Both carcinoma and non-malignant tissue were annotated in consensus on MR images by a radiologist and a researcher using whole mount step-section histopathology as standard of reference. The annotations were used as regions of interest (ROI). A feature set comprising pharmacokinetic parameters and a T1 estimate was extracted from the ROIs to train a support vector machine as classifier. The output of the classifier was used as a measure of likelihood of malignancy. Diagnostic performance of the scheme was evaluated using the area under the ROC curve. The diagnostic accuracy obtained for differentiating prostate cancer from non-malignant disorders in the pe­ ripheral zone was 0.83 (0.75-0.92). This suggests that it is feasible to develop a CAD system capable of characterizing prostate cancer in the peripheral zone based on DCE-MRI. Computerized analysis o f prostate lesions in the peripheral zone using DCE-MRI 11