전립선암의 하이브리드 진단을 위한 로봇시스템: 개발과 진단 정확성의 검증

Abstract

Background: Early diagnosis of the prostate cancer, the most frequently diagnosed type of cancer in men, could provide a major impact to men’s health. The serum prostate specific antigen test and digital rectal examination based screening have resulted in the adaptation of TRUS guided needle biopsy as the standard for routine prostate biopsy. However, the existing diagnostic tools have some limitations, and that need to be addressed to provide more accurate and safe diagnosis to the patients. Purpose: This paper introduces a new robotic system for prostate cancer diagnosis that can be used to increase the diagnostic accuracy. The system is design to perform the palpation examination and needle biopsy together for the prostate cancer detection. Material and Methods: We performed the experiment with identifying the hard inclusion in the tissue phantom, and carried out ex vivo experiments on human prostatectomy specimen as validation of diagnostic accuracy. Furthermore, we suggested the procedure to identify the abnormal tissue regions, and compared the regions obtained using the results of ex vivo experiment with the pathological information. Results: The experimental results show that the developed system can be used to localize the hard tissues such as tumor and tissue malignancy in the prostate gland. The results from the comparison between ex vivo experiment and pathological report show high specificity (95.5%) and PPV (85.7%) to detect the region including the prostate cancer, which indicated that the developed system can identify the cancer tissues from the normal tissues. Conclusions: By using the developed system and proposed procedure, the hybrid diagnosis can be carried out for the prostate cancer diagnosis to increase the detection rate and we may expect to reduce the number of biopsy cores and biopsy-related complications.