Differentiating Cancerous and Non-cancerous Prostate Tissue Using Multi-scale Texture Analysis on MRI

Prostate cancer (PCa) diagnosis is established by pathological examination via biopsies, which are associated with significant complications and false negatives. Using MRIs to identify locations with high probability of containing cancer could instead be used to guide the biopsy procedure. The present investigation aims to identify target regions within different prostatic zones on MRI with high probability of being cancerous for assisting in the decision of where and how to perform biopsy. Our approach involved extracting multi-scale texture features for capturing local patterns to distinguish cancer and healthy tissue in different T2W-MRI prostate zones. Three different classification models were fed by the proposed strategy, namely support vector machine (SVM), Adaboost, and Random Forest. SVM with a linear kernel showed the best classification performance, with AUC scores of 0.91 in the anterior fibromuscular stroma area, 0.85 in the peripheral zone, and 0.87 when classification is performed independently of the prostate zone. The proposed method demonstrated that discriminant multi-scale texture features can accurately identify regions of prostate cancer in a zone-specific fashion, via MRI.