MRI-based prostate cancer detection with high-level representation and hierarchical classification

PURPOSE: Extracting the high-level feature representation by using deep neural networks for detection of prostate cancer, and then based on high-level feature representation constructing hierarchical classification to refine the detection results.

METHODS: High-level feature representation is first learned by a deep learning network, where multiparametric MR images are used as the input data. Then, based on the learned high-level features, a hierarchical classification method is developed, where multiple random forest classifiers are iteratively constructed to refine the detection results of prostate cancer.

RESULTS: The experiments were carried on 21 real patient subjects, and the proposed method achieves an averaged section-based evaluation (SBE) of 89.90%, an averaged sensitivity of 91.51%, and an averaged specificity of 88.47%.

CONCLUSIONS: The high-level features learned from our proposed method can achieve better performance than the conventional handcrafted features (e.g., LBP and Haar-like features) in detecting prostate cancer regions, also the context features obtained from the proposed hierarchical classification approach are effective in refining cancer detection result.