Quantitative 3D digital pathology image analysis for tissue characterization on prostate cancer imaging

医学成像技术，如磁共振成像和计算机断层扫描对我们了解前列腺癌很重要。有效使用这些技术需要了解图像告诉我们的疾病严重程度。男性经常接受前列腺切除手术来治疗癌症；在显微镜下对切除的组织进行评估，可获得可靠的癌症严重程度信息。我们对医学图像外观与癌症疾病状态之间关系的了解大部分是通过比较术前医学图像与术后疾病状态的显微评估来了解的。然而，缺乏适当的工具来帮助专家定量和重复地进行这些评估，这阻碍了我们对使用前列腺医学成像帮助患者的最有效方法的理解。由于工具的缺乏，专家很难一致地报告癌症肿瘤的精确位置、形状、大小和外观，因此这些属性的报告方式不准确，或者根本没有。缺乏必要工具的主要原因是显微组织样本的图像非常大，直到最近，计算机硬件还不足以存储和处理它们。因此，专家们只能通过显微镜观察安装在载玻片上的组织来进行评估，这使得绘制组织上肿瘤的详细边界这样的任务无法准确而快速地完成。最近，这种情况发生了变化，数字病理成像系统现在可以在计算机屏幕上进行组织评估。这为我们提供了一个开发新软件技术的机会，以提供辅助工具，不仅可以在二维，而且可以在三维（3D）中查看组织样本，并允许准确确定每个肿瘤的3D大小，形状，外观和位置。这些软件技术的发展是本提案的主题，它利用向数字病理学范式的转变来开发变革性技术，从而更深入地理解前列腺癌诊断和治疗指导的医学成像的意义和有效使用。

Medical imaging technologies such as magnetic resonance imaging and computed tomography are important to our understanding of prostate cancer. Effective use these technologies requires knowledge of what the images tell us about disease severity. Men often undergo prostate removal surgery for cancer treatment; assessment of the removed tissue under a microscope gives reliable cancer severity information. Most of what we know about the relationship between medical image appearance and cancer disease status was learned by comparing pre-surgical medical images to the post-surgical microscopic assessment of disease status. However, there is a lack of proper tools to assist experts in quantitatively and repeatably making these assessments, and this has hindered our understanding of the most effective ways to use prostate medical imaging to help patients. This lack of tools makes it difficult for experts to consistently report on the precise locations, shapes, sizes, and appearances of cancerous tumours, so instead these attributes are reported in an inexact way or not at all. The main reason for the lack of necessary tools is that images of microscopic tissue samples are extremely large and until recently, computer hardware was not sufficient to store and process them. Experts have therefore been limited to making assessments by looking through microscopes at tissue mounted on glass slides - this makes tasks like outlining the detailed boundaries of tumours on the tissue impossible to perform accurately and quickly. Recently, this has changed, and digital pathology imaging systems now enable tissue assessments on the computer screen. This presents us with an opportunity to develop new software technologies to provide assistive tools that allow viewing of tissue samples not only in two dimensions, but also in three dimensions (3D), and allow the accurate determination of the 3D size, shape, appearance, and location of each tumour. The development of these software technologies is the theme of this proposal, which leverages the shift to the digital pathology paradigm to develop transformative technologies enabling a deeper understanding of the meaning and effective use of medical imaging for prostate cancer diagnosis and therapy guidance.