A medical texture local binary pattern for TRUS prostate segmentation

Prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment rely on segmentation of Transrectal Ultrasound (TRUS) prostate images. This is a challenging and difficult task dut to weak prostate boundaries, speckle noise and the short range of gray levels. Advances in digital imaging techniques have made it possible the acquisition of large volumes of TRUS prostate images so that there is considerable demand for automated segmentation systems. Local binary pattern (LBP) has been used for texture segmentation and analysis. Despite its promising performance for texture classification it has not yet been considered for TRUS prostate segmentation. In this paper we introduce a medical texture local binary pattern operator designed for applications of medical imaging where different tissues or micro organisms might maintain extremely weak underlying textures that make it impossible or very difficult for ordinary texture analysis approaches to classify them. In the proposed method the deformations of a level set contour are controlled based on the medical texture local binary pattern operator.