Segmenting ultrasound images of the prostate using neural networks

This paper describes a method for segmenting transrectal ultrasound images of the prostate using feedforward neural networks. Segmenting two-dimensional images of the prostate into prostate and nonprostate regions is required when forming a three-dimensional image of the prostate from a set of parallel two-dimensional images. Three neural network architectures are presented as examples and discussed. Each of these networks was trained using a small portion of a training image segmented by an expert sonographer. The results of applying the trained networks to the entire training image and to adjacent images in the two-dimensional image set are presented and discussed. The final network architecture was also trained with additional data from two other images in the set. The results of applying this retrained network to each of the images in the set are presented and discussed.