Introduction and Objectives
Accurate prostate gland volumetry with minimal deviation is essential to define the appropriate surgical technique for prostate removal as well as to define the proper radioactive isodose for prostatic cancer. The proposed method is fully automatic.
Material and Methods
Our method uses 20 TR.US images in transverse section with approximately 2 mm distance. An algorithm is applied to process the high speckle images using proper filtering techniques such as the histogram thresholding, the median filter, the stick filter and the regional contrast enhancement. Using the deformable contour model the prostate edges are depicted from each image. A simple algorithm is applied to compute the horizontal and vertical dimensions in pixels in both (x) and (y) axes, exports them in millimeters, and then the volume of each section is estimated. The process is repeated for the next image until the whole gland volume is measured.
Results
The proposed method obtained excellent results as compared to the volumetry of the gland from radical prostatectomy speciments (deviation 8.27% in average) or to MRI volumetry (deviation 11.3% in average).
Conclusions
The proposed algorithm requires no user interaction, provides excellent volumetric results and can be applied to several diagnostic and therapeutic models. The obtained results can be embedded in a database or in patient's health record in order to have future references for treatment response as well as for other uses.
Article info
Identification
Copyright
© 2009 European Association of Urology. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
