The detection of prostate cancer based on ultrasound RF signal

OBJECTIVE: The diagnosis of prostate cancer has been a challenging task. Compared with traditional diagnosis methods, the radiofrequency (RF) signal is not only non-invasive but also rich in microscopic lesion information. This paper proposes a novel and accurate method for detecting prostate cancer based on the ultrasound RF signal. METHOD: Our approach is based on low-dimensional features in the frequency domain and high-throughput features in the spatial domain. The whole process could be divided into two parts: first, we calculate three feature maps from the ultrasound original RF signal, and 1,050 radiomics features are extracted from the three feature maps; second, we extracted 37 spectral features from the normalized frequency spectrum after Fourier transform. RESULTS: We use LASSO regression as the method for feature selection; moreover, we use support vector machine (SVM) for classification 10-fold cross-validation for examining the classification performance of the SVM. An AUC (area under the receiver operating characteristic curve) of 0.84 was obtained on 71 subjects. CONCLUSIONS: Our method is feasible to detect prostate cancer based on the ultrasound RF signal with superior classification performance.