3D MR ventricle segmentation in pre-term infants with post-hemorrhagic ventricle dilatation (PHVD) using multi-phase geodesic level-sets

Wu Qiu; Jing Yuan; Martin Rajchl; Jessica Kishimoto; Yimin Chen; Sandrine de Ribaupierre; Bernard Chiu; Aaron Fenster

doi:10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.05.099

3D MR ventricle segmentation in pre-term infants with post-hemorrhagic ventricle dilatation (PHVD) using multi-phase geodesic level-sets

Neuroimage. 2015 Sep:118:13-25. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.05.099. Epub 2015 Jun 10.

Authors

Wu Qiu¹, Jing Yuan², Martin Rajchl³, Jessica Kishimoto⁴, Yimin Chen⁵, Sandrine de Ribaupierre⁶, Bernard Chiu⁵, Aaron Fenster⁷

Affiliations

¹ Robarts Research Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada. Electronic address: wqiu@robarts.ca.
² Robarts Research Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada. Electronic address: cn.jingyuan@gmail.com.
³ Robarts Research Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada; Biomedical Engineering Graduate Program, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada.
⁴ Robarts Research Institute, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada; Medical Biophysics, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada.
⁵ Department of Electronic Engineering, City University of Hong Kong, PR China.
⁶ Neurosurgery, Department of Clinical Neurological Sciences, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada.
⁷ 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.

PMID: 26070262
DOI: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2015.05.099

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.

Keywords: 3D pre-term neonatal MR with IVH; Convex optimization; Multi-atlas initialization; Multi-phase geodesic level-sets; Ventricle segmentation.

Publication types

Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

Algorithms
Brain / blood supply
Brain / pathology
Brain Mapping / methods*
Cerebral Ventricles / blood supply
Cerebral Ventricles / pathology*
Dilatation
Humans
Hydrocephalus / pathology*
Imaging, Three-Dimensional / methods*
Infant, Newborn
Infant, Premature
Infant, Premature, Diseases / pathology*
Intracranial Hemorrhages / complications*
Magnetic Resonance Imaging / methods*