Cross-Species Segmentation of Animal Prostate Using a Human Prostate Dataset and Limited Preoperative Animal Images: A Sampled Experiment on Dog Prostate Tissue

In the development of medical devices and surgical robot systems, animal models are often used for evaluation, necessitating accurate organ segmentation. Deep learning-based image segmentation provides a solution for automatic and precise organ segmentation. However, a significant challenge in this approach arises from the limited availability of training data for animal models. In contrast, human medical image datasets are readily available. To address this imbalance, this study proposes a fine-tuning approach that combines a limited set of animal model images with a comprehensive human image dataset. Various postprocessing algorithms were applied to ensure that the segmentation results met the positioning requirements for the evaluation of a medical robot under development. As one of the target applications, magnetic resonance images were used to determine the position of the dog's prostate, which was then used to determine the target location of the robot under development. The MSD TASK5 dataset was used as the human dataset for pretraining, which involved a modified U-Net network. Ninety-nine pretrained backbone networks were tested as encoders for U-Net. The cross-training validation was performed using the selected network backbone. The highest accuracy, with an IoU score of 0.949, was achieved using the independent validation set from the MSD TASK5 human dataset. Subsequently, fine-tuning was performed using a small set of dog prostate images, resulting in the highest accuracy of an IoU score of 0.961 across different cross-validation groups. The processed results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach for accurate prostate segmentation.