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A cost-effective, widely available, and practical diagnostic imaging tool for prostate cancer (PCa) localization is still lacking. Recently, the contrast-ultrasound dispersion imaging (CUDI) technique has been developed for PCa localization by quantifying dynamic contrast-enhanced ultrasound (DCE-US) acquisitions. Tissue stiffness is an additional PCa biomarker that can be quantified by ultrasound shear-wave elastography (SWE). In this work, a dedicated preprocessing of 3D DCE-US acquisitions was investigated by using multilinear singular value decomposition (MLSVD), aiming at improving the CUDI performance. Moreover, the diagnostic potential of a multiparametric ultrasound imaging approach combining 3D CUDI features with SWE tissue elasticity for clinically significant (cs)PCa localization was evaluated by comparison with the histopathological outcome of systematic biopsies. In this multiparametric approach, the performance of five classifiers was evaluated and compared for biopsy-region csPCa classification. The classification performance was assessed by the area under the Receiver Operating Characteristics curve (AUC) in a k-fold cross validation fashion comprising sequential floating forward selection of the features. The combination of CUDI features with MLSVD preprocessing and SWE elasticity yielded the best AUC=0.87 for csPCa localization. Our results suggest 3D multiparametric ultrasound imaging approach combing a dedicated preprocessing step to be a useful tool for PCa diagnostics.

The processing of low-frequency interaural time differences is found to be problematic among hearing-impaired people. The current generation of beamformers does not consider this deficiency. In an attempt to tackle this issue, we propose to replace the inaudible interaural time differences in the lowfrequency region with the interaural level differences. In addition, a beamformer is introduced and analyzed, which enhances the low-frequency interaural level differences of the sound sources using a near-field transformation. The proposed beamforming problem is relaxed to a convex problem using semi-definite relaxation. The instrumental analysis suggests that the low-frequency interaural level differences are enhanced without hindering the provided intelligibility. A psychoacoustic localization test is done using a listening experiment, which suggests that the replacement of time differences into level differences improves the localization performance of normal-hearing listeners for an anechoic scene but not for a reverberant scene.

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