# Anatomy-informed Data Augmentation for Enhanced Prostate Cancer Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.03652 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.03652/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [End-to-end Prostate Cancer Detection in bpMRI via 3D CNNs: Effects of Attention Mechanisms, Clinical Priori and Decoupled False Positive Reduction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.03244/) (2021)
- [Learning Soft Tissue Behavior of Organs for Surgical Navigation with Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.00722/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning for fully automatic detection, segmentation, and Gleason Grade estimation of prostate cancer in multiparametric Magnetic Resonance Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12650/) (2021)
- [ProstAttention-Net: A deep attention model for prostate cancer segmentation by aggressiveness in MRI scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.13238/) (2022)
- [Adversarial Deformation Regularization for Training Image Registration Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.10665/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Networks for the Detection of Aggressive Prostate Cancer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.08014/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [LesionLocator: Zero-Shot Universal Tumor Segmentation and Tracking in 3D Whole-Body Imaging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.20985/) (2025)
- [Shape Transformation Driven by Active Contour for Class-Imbalanced Semi-Supervised Medical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14210/) (2024)
- [Promptable Longitudinal Lesion Segmentation in Whole-Body CT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.00613/) (2025)
- [Exploiting Longitudinal Context in Clinician-Verified Interactive Lesion Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23118/) (2026)
- [Anatomy-Informed Neural Networks: Encoding Anatomic Priors in Loss and Architecture, with an SE(3) Formulation of Guidewire-Induced Aortoiliac Deformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.21332/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Data augmentation (DA) is a key factor in medical image analysis, such as in prostate cancer (PCa) detection on magnetic resonance images. State-of-the-art computer-aided diagnosis systems still rely on simplistic spatial transformations to preserve the pathological label post transformation. However, such augmentations do not substantially increase the organ as well as tumor shape variability in the training set, limiting the model's ability to generalize to unseen cases with more diverse localized soft-tissue deformations. We propose a new anatomy-informed transformation that leverages information from adjacent organs to simulate typical physiological deformations of the prostate and generates unique lesion shapes without altering their label. Due to its lightweight computational requirements, it can be easily integrated into common DA frameworks. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our augmentation on a dataset of 774 biopsy-confirmed examinations, by evaluating a state-of-the-art method for PCa detection with different augmentation settings.