Application of Two New Feature Fusion Networks to Improve Real-time Prostate Capsula Detection

Excess prostate tissue is trimmed near the prostate capsula boundary during transurethral plasma kinetic enucleation of prostate (PKEP) and transurethral bipolar plasmakinetic resection of prostate (PKRP) surgeries. If a large portion of the tissue is removed, a prostate capsula perforation can potentially occur. As such, real-time accurate prostate capsula (PC) detection is critical for the prevention of these perforations.

This study investigated the potential for using image denoising, image dimension reduction and feature fusion to improve real-time prostate capsula detection with two objectives. First, this paper mainly studied feature selection and input dimension reduction. Secondly, image denoising was evaluated, as it is of paramount importance to transient stability assessment based on neural networks.

Two new feature fusion techniques, maxpooling bilinear interpolation single-shot multibox detector (PBSSD) and bilinear interpolation single shot multibox detector (BSSD) were proposed. Before original images were sent to the neural network, they were processed by principal component analysis (PCA) and adaptive median filter (AMF) for dimension reduction and image denoising.

The results showed that the application of PCA and AMF with PBSSD increased the mean average precision (mAP) for prostate capsula images by 8.55% and reached 80.15%, compared with single shot multibox detector (SSD) alone. Application of PCA with BSSD increased the mAP for prostate capsula images by 4.6% compared with SSD alone.

Compared with other methods, ours were proven to be more accurate for real-time prostate capsula detection. The improved mAP results suggest that the proposed approaches are powerful tools for improving SSD networks.