Diagnosis of
prostate cancer often involves invasive measures, such as biopsies, in which tissue is removed and graded by a pathologist. Non-invasive measures, such as multi-parametric MRI, can be used to examine lesions and grade them using the PI-RADS scoring scale; however, achievable
image resolution is limited by motion. A new paradigm, magnetic
resonance histopathology (MRH), is disclosed, which aims to evaluate tissue texture at sub-
millimeter resolution through a fast clinical acquisition process. The ability of MRH to identify cancerous tissue in the
prostate through
computer simulation analysis is demonstrated, reproducing the MRH measurement process on a set of high-resolution,
histology slides annotated by pathologists (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 14). A dataset of spectral intensities (20) at sub-
millimeter wavelengths is created, and a
deep learning model (22) trained to classify the
spectral data is based on normal or
tumor tissue. A set of spatial frequencies is identified, which is used to optimize diagnostic capability under the constraint of limited
acquisition time. In addition to single-region classification, the disclosed method and architecture integrate spatial context and local information, the inclusion of which improves model performance and denoises
inference results. In addition to algorithms for estimating the physical
length scale of lesions identified by the model, the trained model is demonstrated to be applied to unlabeled high-resolution 3D MRI data.