Voxel‐wise correlation of positron emission tomography/computed tomography with multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging and histology of the prostate using a sophisticated registration framework

Abstract

ObjectivesTo develop a registration framework for correlating positron emission tomography/computed tomography (PET/CT) images with multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) and histology of the prostate, thereby enabling voxel-wise analysis of imaging parameters. Patients and MethodsIn this prospective proof-of-concept study, nine patients scheduled for radical prostatectomy underwent mpMRI and PET/CT imaging before surgery. One had PET imaging using 18

Registration of presurgical MRI and histopathology images from radical prostatectomy via RAPSODI

“…Although numerous automated approaches for the registration of radiology and histopathology images have been proposed previously (see detailed discussion in the Supplementary material), manual registration approaches are still employed, even in recent publications. [9][10][11][12][13] These manual approaches can generate subjective results and are tedious to use. They either rely on the user's expertise to identify and pick corresponding landmarks in the histopathology images and MRI 9,10,13 or use cognitive alignments.…”

“…[9][10][11][12][13] These manual approaches can generate subjective results and are tedious to use. They either rely on the user's expertise to identify and pick corresponding landmarks in the histopathology images and MRI 9,10,13 or use cognitive alignments. Such cognitive alignments rely on a radiologist to directly outline the cancer region on MRI, with the help of a pathologist for radical prostatectomy cases, 11,17 yet such annotations are known to show smaller lesions that observed on pathology 26 and are unable to capture MRI invisible lesions.…”

“…Although numerous automated approaches for the registration of radiology and histopathology images have been proposed previously (see detailed discussion in the Supplementary material), manual registration approaches are still employed, even in recent publications 9–13 . These manual approaches can generate subjective results and are tedious to use.…”

“…Although numerous approaches for the radiology‐pathology registration in the prostate have been introduced (see section “Prior Work” in the Suplementary Material), these approaches have not been widely adopted and have not been carefully tested by scientists outside the developer teams. Recent publications using histopathology images as a reference to improve MRI and automatically detect cancer 9–13 still require manual approaches to align the histopathology to MR images; these approaches are labor‐intensive and subjective. The slow adoption of previous methods is due to the challenges associated with managing and registering the histopathology images and MRI, the lack of open source methods, and the time constraints associated with running these methods.…”

Progress towards Patient-Specific, Spatially-Continuous Radiobiological Dose Prescription and Planning in Prostate Cancer IMRT: An Overview

“…Imaging biomarkers for predicting prostate tumour location, cell density, and tumour grade from mpMRI have been developed [65,71,76]. Image registration methods have recently been refined further to allow voxel-wise correlation of PET/CT with mpMRI and histology data of the prostate [77]. Work is currently underway to use the voxel-level, patient-specific tumour information from mpMRI and imaging biomarkers to drive biological optimization of prostate IMRT.…”