Weakly supervised deep learning for multimodal MRI-TRUS registration: Toward assisting prostate biopsy guidance

Objective Accurate magnetic resonance imaging-transrectal ultrasound (MRI-TRUS) registration is essential for improving prostate cancer detection and biopsy guidance. This study presents a weakly supervised learning framework to enhance image alignment while minimizing reliance on extensive labeled data. Methods We developed a two-stage weakly supervised framework integrating an attention-enhanced U-Net for prostate segmentation and a residual-enhanced registration network (RERN) for MRI-TRUS alignment. The segmentation model was trained and evaluated on public MRI datasets (MSD Prostate, Promise12, µ-RegPro) and TRUS datasets (µ-RegPro), with additional testing on a clinical cohort of 32 MRI-TRUS pairs. Performance was assessed using dice similarity coefficient (DSC), accuracy (Acc), precision (Pre), recall (Rec), and the 95th percentile Hausdorff distance (HD95). The registration model was trained and tested using MRI-TRUS pairs from µ-RegPro and the clinical cohort, with performance evaluated based on HD95 and target registration error (TRE). Additionally, clinical validation included PI-RADS-like grading, Likert confidence scoring, and receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis to assess diagnostic impact. Results The segmentation model demonstrated high accuracy (DSC: MRI 0.9154, TRUS 0.9384) and strong generalizability to clinical data (MRI 0.9010, TRUS 0.9173). The registration model achieved robust performance, with HD95 of 10.18 mm on public datasets and 11.18 mm on clinical data, and TRE below 8.64 mm. Clinical validation confirmed that registered MRI images preserved diagnostic integrity, as no significant differences were observed in radiologists’ diagnostic performance (AUC: junior 0.706, senior 0.781, p > 0.05). Moreover, registered images enhanced diagnostic confidence among senior radiologists (Likert score: 3.032 vs. 3.548, p = 0.015), highlighting their potential to support expert-level decision-making. Conclusions The proposed weakly supervised framework achieves high-precision MRI-TRUS registration with minimal annotation, ensuring strong generalizability and clinical applicability.