Australian e-Health Research Centre
Australian e-Health Research Centre Australian e-Health Research Centre

Media Release

AEHRC scientists meet the MICCAI 2009 Challenge

5 October 2009

AEHRC's Biomedical Imaging team and its collaborators enjoyed success last month by winning the Prostate Segmentation Challenge at the 12th International Conference on Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI 2009) held in London, England.

The Challenge sees friendly competition amongst biomedical imaging scientists from around the world in order to find the most effective methods for automatically locating the prostate in a set of Magnetic Resonance Image (MRI) scans.

Accurate images are needed to guide radiotherapy, a non-invasive way of treating prostate cancer. But success depends on telling the difference between the prostate and nearby healthy tissue. "Unfortunately the prostate is a difficult organ to spot with conventional CT scans" explained AEHRC's Jason Dowling. "Magnetic resonance imaging is more effective, because it's better at delineating between soft tissues, but it's still not easy", Jason said. "We're working with Dr Peter Greer at Newcastle Mater Hospital on ways of making MR scans more useable for treatment planning".

The Challenge was to automatically segment the prostate from four MR scans within three hours. In image analysis, segmentation makes differences more obvious, in this case it brings out the edge of the prostate. Analysing all those pixels can take time - or really smart software. The results were then compared with outlines drawn manually by radiation oncologists.


Fig. 1 - An expert's manual segmentation of the prostate from an MRI.


Fig. 2 - The result of CSIRO's automatic method.

The AEHRC team defeated contestants from the United Kingdom and Spain. Although the field was small, the international exposure was huge.

"The main beneficiaries of our research in the long run will be the patients. With more accurate imaging, radiation exposure to normal tissues is reduced and the dosage to the prostate can be increased", Jason said.

Congratulations to the team which includes Dr Jason Dowling, Dr Jurgen Fripp, Dr Olivier Salvado, Ales Neubert, Dr Pierrick Bourgeat and research partners from the Newcastle Mater Hospital, including Dr Peter Greer, Jackie Patterson, Dr James Denham, Dr Sanjiv Gupta and Dr Colin Tang.


Fig. 3 - 3D segmented view of the prostate.