Anatomy-informed Data Augmentation for Enhanced Prostate Cancer Detection

TL;DR

This paper introduces an anatomy-informed data augmentation method that leverages adjacent organ information to simulate realistic prostate deformations, improving the generalization of prostate cancer detection models.

Contribution

It presents a novel, lightweight augmentation technique based on anatomical information that enhances shape variability in training data for better model robustness.

Findings

Improved detection accuracy with anatomy-informed augmentation

Enhanced shape variability in training data

Effective integration into existing frameworks

Abstract

Data augmentation (DA) is a key factor in medical image analysis, such as in prostate cancer (PCa) detection on magnetic resonance images. State-of-the-art computer-aided diagnosis systems still rely on simplistic spatial transformations to preserve the pathological label post transformation. However, such augmentations do not substantially increase the organ as well as tumor shape variability in the training set, limiting the model's ability to generalize to unseen cases with more diverse localized soft-tissue deformations. We propose a new anatomy-informed transformation that leverages information from adjacent organs to simulate typical physiological deformations of the prostate and generates unique lesion shapes without altering their label. Due to its lightweight computational requirements, it can be easily integrated into common DA frameworks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our augmentation on a dataset of 774 biopsy-confirmed examinations, by evaluating a state-of-the-art method for PCa detection with different augmentation settings.