3D automatic approach for precise segmentation of the prostate from Diffusion-Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Prostate segmentation is an essential step in developing any non-invasive Computer-Assisted Diagnostic (CAD) system for the early diagnosis of prostate cancer using Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI). In this paper, a novel framework for 3D segmentation of the prostate region from Diffusion-Weighted Magnetic Resonance Imaging (DW-MRI) is proposed. The framework is based on a Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimate of a new log-likelihood function that accounts for Markov-Gibbs shape and appearance models of the object-of-interest and its background. The framework was evaluated on in vivo prostate DW-MRI with available manual expert segmentation. The performance evaluation of the proposed segmentation approach, based on voxel-based and distance-based metrics between manually drawn and automatically segmented contours, confirmed the robustness and accuracy of the proposed segmentation approach.