Early diagnosis of prostate cancer significantly improves a patient's 5-year
survival rate. Biopsy of small prostate cancers is improved with image-guided
biopsy. MRI-ultrasound fusion-guided biopsy is sensitive to smaller tumors but
is underutilized due to the high cost of MRI and fusion equipment.
Micro-ultrasound (micro-US), a novel high-resolution ultrasound technology,
provides a cost-effective alternative to MRI while delivering comparable
diagnostic accuracy. However, the interpretation of micro-US is challenging due
to subtle gray scale changes indicating cancer vs normal tissue. This challenge
can be addressed by training urologists with a large dataset of micro-US images
containing the ground truth cancer outlines. Such a dataset can be mapped from
surgical specimens (histopathology) onto micro-US images via image
registration. In this paper, we present a semi-automated pipeline for
registering in vivo micro-US images with ex vivo whole-mount histopathology
images. Our pipeline begins with the reconstruction of pseudo-whole-mount
histopathology images and a 3D micro-US volume. Each pseudo-whole-mount
histopathology image is then registered with the corresponding axial micro-US
slice using a two-stage approach that estimates an affine transformation
followed by a deformable transformation. We evaluated our registration pipeline
using micro-US and histopathology images from 18 patients who underwent radical
prostatectomy. The results showed a Dice coefficient of 0.94 and a landmark
error of 2.7 mm, indicating the accuracy of our registration pipeline. This
proof-of-concept study demonstrates the feasibility of accurately aligning
micro-US and histopathology images. To promote transparency and collaboration
in research, we will make our code and dataset publicly available.

使用图像注册技术，作者提出了对微型超声进一步应用的可能性，利用大型数据集辅助训练医生进行识别并达到较高的准确率，有望应用于前列腺癌的早期诊断和治疗中。