Deep learning framework based on integration of S-Mask R-CNN and Inception-v3 for ultrasound image-aided diagnosis of prostate cancer

The computer-aided diagnosis of prostate ultrasound images can aid in the detection and treatment of prostate cancer. However, the ultrasound images of the prostate sometimes come with serious speckle noise, low signal-to-noise ratio, and poor detection accuracy. To overcome this shortcoming, we proposed a deep learning model that integrates S-Mask R-CNN and Inception-v3 in the ultrasound image-aided diagnosis of prostate cancer in this paper. The improved S-Mask R-CNN was used to realize the accurate segmentation of prostate ultrasound images and generate candidate regions. The region of interest align algorithm was used to realize the pixel-level feature point positioning. The corresponding binary mask of prostate images was generated by the convolution network to segment the prostate region and the background. Then, the background information was shielded, and a data set of segmented ultrasound images of the prostate was constructed for the Inception-v3 network for lesion detection. A new network model was added to replace the original classification module, which is composed of forward and back propagation. Forward propagation mainly transfers the characteristics extracted from the convolution layer pooling layer below the pool_3 layer through the transfer learning strategy to the input layer and then calculates the loss value between the classified and label values to identify the ultrasound lesion of the prostate. The experimental results showed that the proposed method can accurately detect the ultrasound image of the prostate and segment prostate information at the pixel-level simultaneously. The proposed method has higher accuracy than that of the doctor’s manual diagnosis and other detection methods. Our simple and effective approach will serve as a solid baseline and help ease future research in the computer-aided diagnosis of prostate ultrasound images. Furthermore, this work will promote the development of prostate cancer ultrasound diagnostic technology.