Multi-parametric 3D quantitative ultrasound vibro-elastography imaging for detecting palpable prostate tumors

In this article, we describe a system for detecting dominant prostate tumors, based on a combination of features extracted from a novel multi-parametric quantitative ultrasound elastography technique. The performance of the system was validated on a data-set acquired from n = 10 patients undergoing radical prostatectomy. Multi-frequency steady-state mechanical excitations were applied to each patient's prostate through the perineum and prostate tissue displacements were captured by a transrectal ultrasound system. 3D volumetric data including absolute value of tissue elasticity, strain and frequency-response were computed for each patient. Based on the combination of all extracted features, a random forest classification algorithm was used to separate cancerous regions from normal tissue, and to compute a measure of cancer probability. Registered whole mount histopathology images of the excised prostate gland were used as a ground truth of cancer distribution for classifier training. An area under receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.82 +/- 0.01 was achieved in a leave-one-patient-out cross validation. Our results show the potential of multi-parametric quantitative elastography for prostate cancer detection for the first time in a clinical setting, and justify further studies to establish whether the approach can have clinical use.