The NCI Molecular Imaging Program develops innovative methods of localizing prostate cancer based on in vivo multiparametric MRI.  SPIS contributes to this effort in two areas.  (1) Assisted in the design, implementation, and validation of individualized MR-based molds to facilitate the correlation of the multiparametric MRI imaging with downstream histopathology.  Achieving sufficient MR/histopathology image correlation (i.e., 3D alignment) is critical when evaluating the efficacy of new prostate imaging protocols as potential cancer diagnostics.  During the initial mold development phase, SPIS 3D-printed ~130 patient-specific molds.  Recently, SPIS has resumed the mold printing (2-5 surgeries/week), and is now responsible for automating the process of creating the mold 3D model files from the MRI imaging files.  (2) Developing an unsupervised multi-characteristic framework for prostate cancer localization using diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DW-MRI).

More specifically, the potential single imaging modality localization method consists of combining a number of unique parameters from different models that characterize underlying tissue structure estimated from DW-MRI signal attenuation. The process of combining unique parameters from multiple models allows for the reduction of false positive and false negative voxels compared to using a single parameter, such as only apparent diffusion coefficient or kurtosis. This is due to the fact that theoretically a ‘positive-if-all-positive’ selection process favors higher specificity.