Prostate cancer localization with multispectral MRI based on Relevance Vector Machines

Prostate cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer death for men. However, early detection before cancer spreads beyond the prostate can reduce the mortality. Therefore, in vivo imaging techniques play an important role to localize the prostate cancer for treatment. Although magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been proposed to localize prostate cancer, the studies on automated localization with multispectral MRI have been limited. In this study we propose combining the pharmacokinetic parameters derived from DCE MRI with T2 MRI and DWI. We also propose to use relevance vector machines (RVM) for automatic prostate cancer localization, compare its performance to support vector machines (SVM) and show that RVM can produce more accurate and more efficient segmentation results than SVM for automated prostate cancer localization with multispectral MRI.