3D prostate segmentation from MRI images using modified rotational slice-based level set with non-uniform contour shrinking

Accurate prostate segmentation of 3D prostate images of different modalities plays a key role in image-guided biopsy and therapy of prostate cancer. Recently, an efficient rotational slice-based approach was proposed for transrectal ultrasound (TRUS) images, and accurate results were achieved. When we applied this method to MR images, we encountered several problems, including accumulation of error, and non-convergence due to absence of data. In this paper, we improved this work by proposing a modified rotational volume slicing method with a non-uniform contour shrinking mechanism, which gave better accuracy and robustness for 3D MRI prostate segmentation. The numerical experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method outperformed the original rotational slice-based approach.