Enhanced Deep Neural Network for Prostate Segmentation in Micro-Ultrasound Images.

Prostate cancer is a global health concern, and early diagnosis plays a vital role in improving the survival rate. Accurate segmentation is a key step in the automated diagnosis of prostate cancer; however, manual segmentation remains time-consuming and challenging. Micro-Ultrasound (US) is particularly well-suited for prostate cancer detection, offering real-time imaging with a resolution comparable to that of MRI. This enables improved spatial resolution and detailed visualization of small anatomical structures. With recent advances in deep learning for medical image segmentation, precise prostate segmentation has become critical for biopsy guidance, disease diagnosis, and follow-up. However, segmentation of the prostate in micro-US images remains challenging due to indistinct boundaries between the prostate and surrounding tissue. In this work, we propose a model for precise micro-ultrasound image segmentation. The model employs a dual-encoder architecture that integrates Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Transformer-based encoders in parallel, combined with a fusion module to capture both global dependencies and low-level spatial details. More importantly, we introduce a decoder based on Mamba v2 to enhance segmentation accuracy. A Hypergraph Neural Network (HGNN) is employed as a bridge between the dual encoders and Mamba decoder to model correlations among non-pairwise connections. Experimental results on micro-US datasets demonstrated that our model achieved superior or comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods, with a Dice score of 0.9416 and an HD95 of 1.93.