Augmenting MRI-transrectal ultrasound-guided prostate biopsy with temporal ultrasound data: a clinical feasibility study.

PURPOSE: In recent years, fusion of multi-parametric MRI (mp-MRI) with transrectal ultrasound (TRUS)-guided biopsy has enabled targeted prostate biopsy with improved cancer yield. Target identification is solely based on information from mp-MRI, which is subsequently transferred to the subject coordinates through an image registration approach. mp-MRI has shown to be highly sensitive to detect higher-grade prostate cancer, but suffers from a high rate of false positives for lower-grade cancer, leading to unnecessary biopsies. This paper utilizes a machine-learning framework to further improve the sensitivity of targeted biopsy through analyzing temporal ultrasound data backscattered from the prostate tissue. METHODS: Temporal ultrasound data were acquired during targeted fusion prostate biopsy from suspicious cancer foci identified in mp-MRI. Several spectral features, representing the signature of backscattered signal from the tissue, were extracted from the temporal ultrasound data. A supervised support vector machine classification model was trained to relate the features to the result of histopathology analysis of biopsy cores obtained from cancer foci. The model was used to predict the label of biopsy cores for mp-MRI-identified targets in an independent group of subjects. RESULTS: Training of the classier was performed on data obtained from 35 biopsy cores. A fivefold cross-validation strategy was utilized to examine the consistency of the selected features from temporal ultrasound data, where we achieved the classification accuracy and area under receiver operating characteristic curve of 94 % and 0.98, respectively. Subsequently, an independent group of 25 biopsy cores was used for validation of the model, in which mp-MRI had identified suspicious cancer foci. Using the trained model, we predicted the tissue pathology using temporal ultrasound data: 16 out of 17 benign cores, as well as all three higher-grade cancer cores, were correctly identified. CONCLUSION: The results show that temporal analysis of ultrasound data is potentially an effective approach to complement mp-MRI-TRUS-guided prostate cancer biopsy, specially to reduce the number of unnecessary biopsies and to reliably identify higher-grade cancers.

Ultrasound RF time series for classification of breast lesions.

This work reports the use of ultrasound radio frequency (RF) time series analysis as a method for ultrasound-based classification of malignant breast lesions. The RF time series method is versatile and requires only a few seconds of raw ultrasound data with no need for additional instrumentation. Using the RF time series features, and a machine learning framework, we have generated malignancy maps, from the estimated cancer likelihood, for decision support in biopsy recommendation. These maps depict the likelihood of malignancy for regions of size 1 mm(2) within the suspicious lesions. We report an area under receiver operating characteristics curve of 0.86 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.84%-0.90%) using support vector machines and 0.81 (95% CI: 0.78-0.85) using Random Forests classification algorithms, on 22 subjects with leave-one-subject-out cross-validation. Changing the classification method yielded consistent results which indicates the robustness of this tissue typing method. The findings of this report suggest that ultrasound RF time series, along with the developed machine learning framework, can help in differentiating malignant from benign breast lesions, subsequently reducing the number of unnecessary biopsies after mammography screening.