• Journal of Computational Design and Engineering
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• v.1 no.4
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• pp.272-288
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• 2014

This paper presents a two-step, semi-automated method for reconstructing a three-dimensional (3D) shape of the prostate from a 3D transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) image. While the method has been developed for prostate ultrasound imaging, it can potentially be applicable to any other organ of the body and other imaging modalities. The proposed method takes as input a 3D TRUS image and generates a watertight 3D surface model of the prostate. In the first step, the system lets the user visualize and navigate through the input volumetric image by displaying cross sectional views oriented in arbitrary directions. The user then draws partial/full contours on selected cross sectional views. In the second step, the method automatically generates a watertight 3D surface of the prostate by fitting a deformable spherical template to the set of user-specified contours. Since the method allows the user to select the best cross-sectional directions and draw only clearly recognizable partial or full contours, the user can avoid time-consuming and inaccurate guesswork on where prostate contours are located. By avoiding the usage of noisy, incomprehensible portions of the TRUS image, the proposed method yields more accurate prostate shapes than conventional methods that demand complete cross-sectional contours selected manually, or automatically using an image processing tool. Our experiments confirmed that a 3D watertight surface of the prostate can be generated within five minutes even from a volumetric image with a high level of speckles and shadow noises.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.3 no.5
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• pp.187-194
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• 2014

Prostate cancer is a malignant tumor occurring in the prostate. Recently, the repetition rate is increasing. Image inspection method which we can check the prostate structure the most correctly is MRI(Magnetic Resonance Imaging), but it is hard to apply it to all the patients because of the cost. So, they use mostly TRUS(Transrectal Ultrasound) images acquired from prostate ultrasound inspection and which are cheap and easy to inspect the prostate in the process of treating and diagnosing the prostate cancer. Traditionally, in the hospital the doctors saw the TRUS images by their eyes and manually segmented the boundary between the prostate and nonprostate. But the manually segmenting process not only needed too much time but also had different boundaries according to the doctor. To cope the problems, some automatic segmentations of the prostate have been studied to generate the constant segmentation results and get the belief from patients. In this study, we propose an average shape model to segment the prostate boundary in TRUS prostate image. The method has 3 steps. First, it finds the probe using edge distribution. Next, it finds two straight lines connected with the probe. Finally it puts the shape model to the image using the position of the probe and straight lines.

• Radiation Oncology Journal
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• v.29 no.3
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• pp.199-205
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• 2011

Purpose: The present study compared the difference between intraoperative transrectal ultrasound (iTRUS)-based prostate volume and preplan computed tomography (CT), preplan magnetic resonance imaging (MRI)-based prostate volume to estimate the number of seeds needed for appropriate dose coverage in permanent brachytherapy for prostate cancer. Materials and Methods: Between March 2007 and March 2011, among 112 patients who underwent permanent brachytherapy with $^{125}I$, 60 image scans of 56 patients who underwent preplan CT (pCT) or preplan MRI (pMRI) within 2 months before brachytherapy were retrospectively reviewed. Twenty-four cases among 30 cases with pCT and 26 cases among 30 cases with pMRI received neoadjuvant hormone therapy (NHT). In 34 cases, NHT started after acquisition of preplan image. The median duration of NHT after preplan image acquisition was 17 and 21 days for cases with pCT and pMRI, respectively. The prostate volume calculated by different modalities was compared. And retrospective planning with iTRUS image was performed to estimate the number of $^{125}I$ seed required to obtain recommended dose distribution according to prostate volume. Results: The mean difference in prostate volume was 9.05 mL between the pCT and iTRUS and 6.84 mL between the pMRI and iTRUS. The prostate volume was roughly overestimated by 1.36 times with pCT and by 1.33 times with pMRI. For 34 cases which received NHT after image acquisition, the prostate volume was roughly overestimated by 1.45 times with pCT and by 1.37 times with pMRI. A statistically significant difference was found between preplan image-based volume and iTRUS-based volume (p<0.001). The median number of wasted seeds is approximately 13, when the pCT or pMRI volume was accepted without modification to assess the required number of seeds for brachytherapy. Conclusion: pCT-based volume and pMRI-based volume tended to overestimate prostate volume in comparison to iTRUS-based volume. To reduce wasted seeds and cost of the brachytherapy, we should take the volume discrepancy into account when we estimate the number of $^{125}I$ seeds for permanent brachytherapy.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.15 no.6
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• pp.675-682
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• 2014

Prostate is only an organ of men. To diagnose the disease of the prostate, generally transrectal ultrasound(TRUS) images are used. Detecting its boundary is a challenging and difficult task due to weak prostate boundaries, speckle noise and the short range of gray levels. In this paper a method for automatic prostate segmentation in TRUS images using Support Vector Machine(SVM) is presented. This method involves preprocessing, extracting Gabor feature, training, and prostate segmentation. The speckle reduction for preprocessing step has been achieved by using stick filter and top-hat transform has been implemented for smoothing. Gabor filter bank for extraction of rotation-invariant texture features has been implemented. SVM for training step has been used to get each feature of prostate and nonprostate. Finally, the boundary of prostate is extracted. A number of experiments are conducted to validate this method and results shows that the proposed algorithm extracted the prostate boundary with less than 10% relative to boundary provided manually by doctors.

• KIPS Transactions on Software and Data Engineering
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• v.1 no.3
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• pp.187-194
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• 2012

Prostate cancer is one of the most frequent cancers in men and is a major cause of mortality in the most of countries. In many diagnostic and treatment procedures for prostate disease, transrectal ultrasound(TRUS) images are being used because the cost is low. But, accurate detection of prostate boundaries is a challenging and difficult task due to weak prostate boundaries, speckle noises and the short range of gray levels. This paper proposes a method for automatic prostate segmentation in TRUS images using its average shape model and invariant features. This approach consists of 4 steps. First, it detects the probe position and the two straight lines connected to the probe using edge distribution. Next, it acquires 3 prostate patches which are in the middle of average model. The patches will be used to compare the features of prostate and nonprostate. Next, it compares and classifies which blocks are similar to 3 representative patches. Last, the boundaries from prior classification and the rough boundaries from first step are used to determine the segmentation. A number of experiments are conducted to validate this method and results showed that this new approach extracted the prostate boundary with less than 7.78% relative to boundary provided manually by experts.

• Journal of the Korea Society of Computer and Information
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• v.21 no.11
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• pp.103-111
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• 2016

Traditionally, in the hospital the doctors saw the TRUS images by their eyes and manually segmented the boundary between the prostate and nonprostate. But the manually segmenting process not only needed too much time but also had different boundaries according to the doctor. To cope the problems, some automatic segmentations of the prostate have been studied to generate the constant segmentation results and get the belief from patients. Besides, on detecting the boundary, the ones in the middle of all images are easy to find the boundary but the base and apex of the images are hard to do it since there are lots of uncertain boundary. Accurate detection of prostate boundaries is a challenging and difficult task due to weak prostate boundaries, speckle noises and the short range of gray levels. In this paper, we propose the method that extracts a prostate boundary using features of its directions on prostate image. As a result of our experiments, it shows that the boundary never falls short of the existing methods or human expert's segmentation. And also, its searching speed is too fast because the method searches a smaller area that other methods.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.16 no.5
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• pp.717-725
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• 2015

Prostate images have been used in the diagnosis of prostate using TRUS images being relatively cheap. Ultrasound images are recorded with 3 dimension and one diagnostic exam is made with a number of the images. A doctor can see 2 dimensional images on the monitor sequentially and 3 dimensional ones to diagnose a disease. To display the images, 2-d images are used with raw 2-d ones, but 3-d images need to be segmented by the prostates and their backgrounds to be seen from different angles and with cut images of inner side. Especially on detecting the boundary, the ones in the middle of all images are easy to find the boundary but the base and apex of the images are hard to do it since there are lots of uncertain boundary. So, in this paper we propose the method that applies an average shape model and detects the boundary, and shows its superiority compared to the existing methods with experiments.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
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• v.17 no.6
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• pp.603-611
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• 2016

Generally, the doctors manually delineated the prostate boundary seeing the image by their eyes, but the manual method not only needed quite much time but also had different boundaries depending on doctors. To reduce the effort like them the automatic delineating methods are needed, but detecting the boundary is hard to do since there are lots of uncertain textures or speckle noises. There have been studied in SVM, SIFT, Gabor texture filter, snake-like contour, and average-shape model methods. Besides, there were lots of studies about 2 and 3 dimension images and CT and MRI. But no studies have been developed superior to human experts and they need additional studies. For this, this paper proposes a method that delineates the boundary predicting its texture features and its average distribution on the prostate image. As result, we got the similar boundary as the method of human experts.

• International Journal of Computer Science & Network Security
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• v.21 no.5
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• pp.1-8
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• 2021

Prostate cancer is one of the most diagnosed malignancies found across the world today. American cancer society in recent research predicted that over 174,600 new prostate cancer cases found and nearly 31,620 death cases recorded. Researchers are developing modest and accurate methodologies to detect and diagnose prostate cancer. Recent work has been done in radiology to detect prostate tumors using ultrasound imaging and resonance imaging techniques. Transrectal ultrasound and Magnetic resonance images of the prostate gland help in the detection of cancer in the prostate gland. The proposed paper is based on comparison and analysis between two novel image segmentation approaches. Seed region growing and cluster based image segmentation is used to extract the region from trans-rectal ultrasound prostate and MR prostate images. The region of extraction represents the abnormality area that presents in men's prostate gland. Detection of such abnormalities in the prostate gland helps in the identification and treatment of prostate cancer

• Journal of radiological science and technology
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• v.38 no.4
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• pp.437-442
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• 2015

Accurate volume measurement of the prostate is a significant role in determining the result of diagnosis and treatment of benign prostate hyperplasia. The purpose of this study was to determine, when measuring prostate volume by TRUS, whether location is more accurately determined by transaxial or longitudinal scanning. With reference to the patient's image, it was produced six prostate model. It compares the actual volume and the measurement volume, and find the optimal measurement position of each specific model. Prostate volume measured by TRUS closely correlates with prostate phantom volume. There was no significant difference(p = .156). To measure the accurate volume of prostate with focal protrusion, its length should be measured exclude the protrusions.