Robust Prostate Segmentation Using Intrinsic Properties of TRUS Images

Accurate segmentation is usually crucial in transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) image based prostate diagnosis; however, it is always hampered by heavy speckles. Contrary to the traditional view that speckles are adverse to segmentation, we exploit intrinsic properties induced by speckles to facilitate the task, based on the observations that sizes and orientations of speckles provide salient cues to determine the prostate boundary. Since the speckle orientation changes in accordance with a statistical prior rule, rotation-invariant texture feature is extracted along the orientations revealed by the rule. To address the problem of feature changes due to different speckle sizes, TRUS images are split into several arc-like strips. In each strip, every individual feature vector is sparsely represented, and representation residuals are obtained. The residuals, along with the spatial coherence inherited from biological tissues, are combined to segment the prostate preliminarily via graph cuts. After that, the segmentation is fine-tuned by a novel level sets model, which integrates 1) the prostate shape prior, 2) dark-to-light intensity transition near the prostate boundary, and 3) the texture feature just obtained. The proposed method is validated on two 2-D image datasets obtained from two different sonographic imaging systems, with the mean absolute distance on the mid gland images only 1.06±0.53 mm and 1.25±0.77 mm, respectively. The method is also extended to segment apex and base images, producing competitive results over the state of the art.