Multimodal T2w and DWI Prostate Gland Automated Registration

Multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) is emerging as a promising tool in the clinical pathway of prostate cancer (PCa). The registration between a structural and a functional imaging modality, such as T2-weighted (T2w) and diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is fundamental in the development of a mpMRI-based computer aided diagnosis (CAD) system for PCa. Here, we propose an automated method to register the prostate gland in T2w and DWI image sequences by a landmark-based affine registration and a non-parametric diffeomorphic registration. An expert operator manually segmented the prostate gland in both modalities on a dataset of 20 patients. Target registration error and Jaccard index, which measures the overlap between masks, were evaluated pre- and post- registration resulting in an improvement of 44% and 21%, respectively. In the future, the proposed method could be useful in the framework of a CAD system for PCa detection and characterization in mpMRI.