In our testing, MRI images revealed several spots of suspicious tissue, but four expert radiologists disagreed as to which ones were cancerous, said Madabhushi. Our computer-aided techniques assign probability ratings to the spots, which help a radiologist reach a more confident answer.
A physician would still need to confirm a radiologists diagnosis with a biopsy. Still, the techniques being developed could eliminate biopsies when suspicious tissue is judged to be healthy. The new methods also could help physicians home in on the tissue in question, resulting in more accurate biopsies.
The same imaging techniques could prove useful in treatment. A definitive fix on where cancerous tissue lies could help physicians focus radiation on that region and reduce collateral damage to neighboring tissues and organs.
The researchers are also applying CAD techniques to histology, or the detailed analysis of tissue samples taken during biopsies. Just as radiologists differ in their interpretation of prostate images, pathologists may assign different severity grades to the same sample of cancerous tissue. Inaccurate grading may result in therapy too weak to treat the cancer or so aggressive that it prolongs therapy and harms healthy tissue. Early results show that where pathologists have trouble distinguishing between two medium grades of severity, computer-aided analyses can deliver an 80 percent accuracy rate.
Another technique the Rutgers and Penn scientists are pursuing is magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS), which measures the concentrations of chemicals in the prostate gland. Healthy tissue shows different proportions of chemicals than cancerous tissues, so MRS might provide more convincing evidence for the p
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Contact: Carl Blesch
cblesch@ur.rutgers.edu
732-932-7084 x616
Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey
20-Jun-2007