Registering Histologic and MR Images of Prostate for Image-based Cancer Detection1

Rationale and Objectives. Needle biopsy is currently the only way to confirm prostate cancer. To increase prostate cancer diagnostic rate, needles are expected to be deployed at suspicious cancer locations. High-contrast magnetic resonance (MR) imaging provides a powerful tool for detecting suspicious cancerous tissues. To do this, MR appearances of cancerous tissue should be characterized and learned from a sufficient number of prostate MR images with known cancer information. However, ground-truth cancer information is only available in histologic images. Therefore it is necessary to warp ground-truth cancerous regions in histological images to MR images by a registration procedure. The objective of this article is to develop a registration technique for aligning histological and MR images of the same prostate.