CWRU team takes first at National Cancer Institute competition

On April 7, the Center for Computational Imaging and Personalized Diagnostics (CCIPD) team won first place in the National Cancer Institute-sponsored Grand Challenge on Segmentation of Prostatic Structures from MRI.

The first-place Case Western Reserve University team was represented by graduate student Robert Toth, research associate Mirabela Rusu and biomedical engineering faculty member Anant Madabhushi.

The Grand Challenge involved segmenting the peripheral zone from the central gland, structures within the prostate that are difficult to discern on MRI visually. Tumors on the peripheral zone are more frequent and look different than central gland tumors. Therefore, segmenting the central zone from the peripheral zone would allow researchers to develop more accurate computer-aided diagnostic techniques to localize the extent of the cancer.

Held in conjunction with the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers’ International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, the Grand Challenge was jointly organized by NCI, CWRU, Boston Medical Center, Radboud University and Kitware. The segmentation algorithms, developed within CCIPD, were applied for the challenge. The CCIPD algorithms beat out those from a number of other participating teams from the U.S. and abroad.