Ultrasound-Based Characterization of Prostate Cancer Using Joint Independent Component Analysis.

Abstract

This paper presents the results of a new approach for selection of RF time series features based on joint independent component analysis for in vivo characterization of prostate cancer. We project three sets of RF time series features extracted from the spectrum, fractal dimension, and the wavelet transform of the ultrasound RF data on a space spanned by five joint independent components. Then, we demonstrate that the obtained mixing coefficients from a group of patients can be used to train a classifier, which can be applied to characterize cancerous regions of a test patient. In a leave-one-patient-out cross validation, an area under receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.93 and classification accuracy of 84% are achieved. Ultrasound RF time series can be used to accurately characterize prostate cancer, in vivo without the need for exhaustive search in the feature space. We use joint independent component analysis for systematic fusion of multiple sets of RF time series features, within a machine learning framework, to characterize PCa in an in vivo study.