Prostate cancer (PCa) is a severe disease among men globally. It is important to identify PCa early and make a precise diagnosis for effective treatment. For PCa diagnosis, Multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) emerged as an invaluable imaging modality that offers a precise anatomical view of the prostate gland and its tissue structure. Deep learning (DL) models can enhance existing clinical systems and improve patient care by locating regions of interest for physicians. Recently, DL techniques have been employed to develop a pipeline for segmenting and classifying different cancer types. These studies show that DL can be used to increase diagnostic precision and give objective results without variability. This work uses well-known DL models for the classification and segmentation of mpMRI images to detect PCa. Our implementation involves four pipelines; Semantic DeepSegNet with ResNet50, DeepSegNet with recurrent neural network (RNN), U-Net with RNN, and U-Net with a long short-term memory (LSTM). Each segmentation model is paired with a different classifier to evaluate the performance using different metrics. The results of our experiments show that the pipeline that uses the combination of U-Net and the LSTM model outperforms all other combinations, excelling in both segmentation and classification tasks.

Nine radiologists (three each high, intermediate, low experience) from eight institutions participated. A total of 163 patients with 3-T mpMRI from 4/2012 to 6/2015 were included: 110 cancer patients with prostatectomy after mpMRI, 53 patients with no lesions on mpMRI and negative TRUS-guided biopsy. Readers were blinded to all outcomes and detected lesions per PI-RADSv2 on mpMRI. After 5 weeks, readers re-evaluated patients using CAD to detect lesions. Prostatectomy specimens registered to MRI were ground truth with index lesions defined on pathology.

A new paradigm is beginning to emerge in Radiology with the advent of increased computational capabilities and algorithms. This has led to the ability of real time learning by computer systems of different lesion types to help the radiologist in defining disease. For example, using a deep learning network, we developed and tested a multiparametric deep learning (MPDL) network for segmentation and classification using multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) radiological images. The MPDL network was constructed from stacked sparse autoencoders with inputs from mpMRI. Evaluation of MPDL consisted of cross-validation, sensitivity, and specificity. Dice similarity between MPDL and post-DCE lesions were evaluated. We demonstrate high sensitivity and specificity for differentiation of malignant from benign lesions of 90% and 85% respectively with an AUC of 0.93. The Integrated MPDL method accurately segmented and classified different breast tissue from multiparametric breast MRI using deep leaning tissue signatures.