Estimation of the Prostate Volume from Abdominal Ultrasound Images by Image-Patch Voting

Abstract

Estimation of the prostate volume with ultrasound offers many advantages such as portability, low cost, harmlessness, and suitability for real-time operation. Abdominal Ultrasound (AUS) is a practical procedure that deserves more attention in automated prostate-volume-estimation studies. As the experts usually consider automatic end-to-end volume-estimation procedures as non-transparent and uninterpretable systems, we proposed an expert-in-the-loop automatic system that follows the classical prostate-volume-estimation procedures. Our system directly estimates the diameter parameters of the standard ellipsoid formula to produce the prostate volume. To obtain the diameters, our system detects four diameter endpoints from the transverse and two diameter endpoints from the sagittal AUS images as defined by the classical procedure. These endpoints are estimated using a new image-patch voting method to address characteristic problems of AUS images. We formed a novel prostate AUS data set from 305 patients with both transverse and sagittal planes. The data set includes MRI images for 75 of these patients. At least one expert manually marked all the data. Extensive experiments performed on this data set showed that the proposed system results ranged among experts' volume estimations, and our system can be used in clinical practice.