Detecting the Prostate Contour in TRUS Image using Support Vector Machine and Rotation-invariant Textures

Abstract

Prostate is only an organ of men. To diagnose the disease of the prostate, generally transrectal ultrasound(TRUS) images are used. Detecting its boundary is a challenging and difficult task due to weak prostate boundaries, speckle noise and the short range of gray levels. In this paper a method for automatic prostate segmentation in TRUS images using Support Vector Machine(SVM) is presented. This method involves preprocessing, extracting Gabor feature, training, and prostate segmentation. The speckle reduction for preprocessing step has been achieved by using stick filter and top-hat transform has been implemented for smoothing. Gabor filter bank for extraction of rotation-invariant texture features has been implemented. SVM for training step has been used to get each feature of prostate and nonprostate. Finally, the boundary of prostate is extracted. A number of experiments are conducted to validate this method and results shows that the proposed algorithm extracted the prostate boundary with less than 10% relative to boundary provided manually by doctors.