title: 3D MR ventricle segmentation in pre-term infants with post-hemorrhagic ventricle dilatation (PHVD) using multi-phase geodesic level-sets.
abstract: Intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) or bleed within the cerebral ventricles is a common condition among very low birth weight pre-term neonates. The prognosis for these patients is worsened should they develop progressive ventricular dilatation, i.e., post-hemorrhagic ventricle dilatation (PHVD), which occurs in 10-30% of IVH patients. Accurate measurement of ventricular volume would be valuable information and could be used to predict PHVD and determine whether that specific patient with ventricular dilatation requires treatment. While the monitoring of PHVD in infants is typically done by repeated transfontanell 2D ultrasound (US) and not MRI, once the patient's fontanels have closed around 12-18months of life, the follow-up patient scans are done by MRI. Manual segmentation of ventricles from MR images is still seen as a gold standard. However, it is extremely time- and labor-consuming, and it also has observer variability. This paper proposes an accurate multiphase geodesic level-set segmentation algorithm for the extraction of the cerebral ventricle system of pre-term PHVD neonates from 3D T1 weighted MR images. The proposed segmentation algorithm makes use of multi-region segmentation technique associated with spatial priors built from a multi-atlas registration scheme. The leave-one-out cross validation with 19 patients with mild enlargement of ventricles and 7 hydrocephalus patients shows that the proposed method is accurate, suggesting that the proposed approach could be potentially used for volumetric and morphological analysis of the ventricle system of IVH neonatal brains in clinical practice.
authors.affiliation: Robarts Research Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada. Electronic address: wqiu@robarts.ca.
authors.forename: Wu
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Qiu
authors.affiliation: Robarts Research Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada. Electronic address: cn.jingyuan@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yuan
authors.affiliation: Robarts Research Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada; Biomedical Engineering Graduate Program, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Rajchl
authors.affiliation: Robarts Research Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada; Medical Biophysics, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Jessica
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kishimoto
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, PR China.
authors.forename: Yimin
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.affiliation: Neurosurgery, Department of Clinical Neurological Sciences, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Sandrine
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: de Ribaupierre
authors.affiliation: Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, PR China.
authors.forename: Bernard
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Chiu
authors.affiliation: Robarts Research Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada; Biomedical Engineering Graduate Program, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada; Medical Biophysics, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada.
authors.forename: Aaron
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Fenster
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001921:Brain / Q000098:blood supply / Q000473:pathology; D001931:Brain Mapping / Q000379:methods*; D002552:Cerebral Ventricles / Q000098:blood supply / Q000473:pathology*; D004106:Dilatation; D006801:Humans; D006849:Hydrocephalus / Q000473:pathology*; D021621:Imaging, Three-Dimensional / Q000379:methods*; D007231:Infant, Newborn; D007234:Infant, Premature; D007235:Infant, Premature, Diseases / Q000473:pathology*; D020300:Intracranial Hemorrhages / Q000150:complications*; D008279:Magnetic Resonance Imaging / Q000379:methods*
keywords: 3D pre-term neonatal MR with IVH; Convex optimization; Multi-atlas initialization; Multi-phase geodesic level-sets; Ventricle segmentation