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Pingkun Yan awarded journal best paper award

Posted September 13, 2017
Pingkun Yan's paper titled "Detection and Grading of Prostrate Cancer using Temporal Enhanced Ultrasound: Combining Deep Neural Networks and Tissue Mimicking Simulations" has won the best paper award of a special issue of the International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery devoted to papers presented at the Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI) conference. The abstract of the paper is shown below: PURPOSE: Temporal Enhanced Ultrasound (TeUS) has been proposed as a new paradigm for tissue characterization based on a sequence of ultrasound radio frequency (RF) data. We previously used TeUS to successfully address the problem of prostate cancer detection in the fusion biopsies. METHODS: In this paper, we use TeUS to address the problem of grading prostate cancer in a clinical study of 197 biopsy cores from 132 patients. Our method involves capturing high-level latent features of TeUS with a deep learning approach followed by distribution learning to cluster aggressive cancer in a biopsy core. In this hypothesis-generating study, we utilize deep learning based feature visualization as a means to obtain insight into the physical phenomenon governing the interaction of temporal ultrasound with tissue. RESULTS: Based on the evidence derived from our feature visualization, and the structure of tissue from digital pathology, we build a simulation framework for studying the physical phenomenon underlying TeUS-based tissue characterization. CONCLUSION: Results from simulation and feature visualization corroborated with the hypothesis that micro-vibrations of tissue microstructure, captured by low-frequency spectral features of TeUS, can be used for detection of prostate cancer. The full paper can be downloaded here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28634789