Prostate diseases diagnosis in power doppler sonography

In order to detect early prostate cancer, physicians usually apply the ultrasound imaging to visualize prostate for diagnosis. However, the traditional gray-scale ultrasound images that obtained from transrectal ultrasound of the prostate are often limited in diagnosing prostate cancer because of cancer heterogeneity, which makes direct diagnosing on the image difficult. Power Doppler ultrasound images improve the diagnosis by providing extra information of blood flow. Previous study has shown that increased blood inflow exists in prostate cancer. It is not difficult to differentiate the malignancy from benign prostate diseases by inspecting Doppler spectrum at bilateral neurovascular bundle sites and using resistive index. Although it is effective; however, it is hand-held, time-consuming, and only limited in a small and static region, which might not represent the real status of the whole prostate. Therefore, this study proposed an integrated dynamic approach to estimate the resistive index of blood flow in regions of interest within or all over the whole prostate. Merits of the proposed approach include the follows: resistive index can be calculated in serial prostate frames; the calculation can be performed on integral prostate region; and the proposed approach shortened the time needed to complete the calculation on whole prostate. Experimental results show that dynamic resistive index is better than conventional resistive index, and comparable with Prostate specific antigen (PSA) test in diagnosing prostate cancer, indicating high performance of the proposed approach, which also reveals feasibility and effectively of it.