Semi-automatic deformable registration of prostate MR images to pathological slices

To present a semi-automatic deformable registration algorithm for co-registering T2-weighted (T2w) images of the prostate with whole-mount pathological sections of prostatectomy specimens.

Twenty-four patients underwent 1.5 Tesla (T) endorectal MR imaging before radical prostatectomy with whole-mount step-section pathologic analysis of surgical specimens. For each patient, the T2w imaging containing the largest area of tumor was manually matched with the corresponding pathologic slice. The prostate was co-registered using a free-form deformation (FFD) algorithm based on B-splines. Registration quality was assessed through differences between prostate diameters measured in right-left (RL) and anteroposterior (AP) directions on T2w images and pathologic slices and calculation of the Dice similarity coefficient, D, for the whole prostate (WP), the peripheral zone (PZ) and the transition zone (TZ).

The mean differences in diameters measured on pathology and MR imaging in the RL direction and the AP direction were 0.49 cm and -0.63 cm, respectively, before registration and 0.10 cm and -0.11 cm, respectively, after registration. The mean D values for the WP, PZ and TZ, were 0.76, 0.65, and 0.77, respectively, before registration and increased to 0.91, 0.76, and 0.85, respectively, after registration. The improvements in D were significant for all three tissues (P < 0.001 for all).

The proposed semi-automatic method enabled successful co-registration of anatomical prostate MR images to pathologic slices.