Multiparametric MRI prostate cancer analysis via a hybrid morphological-textural model.

Multiparametric MRI has shown considerable promise as a diagnostic tool for prostate cancer grading. Diffusion-weighted MRI (DWI) has shown particularly strong potential for improving the delineation between cancerous and healthy tissue in the prostate gland. Current automated diagnostic methods using multiparametric MRI, however, tend to either use low-level features, which are difficult to interpret by radiologists and clinicians, or use highly subjective heuristic methods. We propose a novel strategy comprising a tumor candidate identification scheme and a hybrid textural-morphological feature model for delineating between cancerous and non-cancerous tumor candidates in the prostate gland via multiparametric MRI. Experimental results using clinical multiparametric MRI datasets show that the proposed strategy has strong potential as a diagnostic tool to aid radiologists and clinicians identify and detect prostate cancer more efficiently and effectively.