Automatic Segmentation and Location Learning of Neonatal Cerebral Ventricles in 3D Ultrasound Data Combining CNN and CPPN
This work provides an incremental improvement for the automatic detection and monitoring of ventriculomegaly in preterm neonates, which can lead to life-threatening hydrocephalus and neuro-developmental impairments.
This paper addresses the imprecise estimation of Cerebral Ventricular System (CVS) volume in preterm neonates due to the lack of 3D information from manual 2D ultrasound measurements. The authors propose an automatic segmentation method for 3D ultrasound data combining CNNs with Compositional Pattern Producing Networks (CPPN) to learn CVS location. The method achieved Dice scores of 0.893 and 0.886 for dilated ventricles, reaching intraobserver variability, and 0.797 for normal ventricles with 3D CNNs.
Preterm neonates are highly likely to suffer from ventriculomegaly, a dilation of the Cerebral Ventricular System (CVS). This condition can develop into life-threatening hydrocephalus and is correlated with future neuro-developmental impairments. Consequently, it must be detected and monitored by physicians. In clinical routing, manual 2D measurements are performed on 2D ultrasound (US) images to estimate the CVS volume but this practice is imprecise due to the unavailability of 3D information. A way to tackle this problem would be to develop automatic CVS segmentation algorithms for 3D US data. In this paper, we investigate the potential of 2D and 3D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to solve this complex task and propose to use Compositional Pattern Producing Network (CPPN) to enable the CNNs to learn CVS location. Our database was composed of 25 3D US volumes collected on 21 preterm nenonates at the age of $35.8 \pm 1.6$ gestational weeks. We found that the CPPN enables to encode CVS location, which increases the accuracy of the CNNs when they have few layers. Accuracy of the 2D and 3D CNNs reached intraobserver variability (IOV) in the case of dilated ventricles with Dice of $0.893 \pm 0.008$ and $0.886 \pm 0.004$ respectively (IOV = $0.898 \pm 0.008$) and with volume errors of $0.45 \pm 0.42$ cm$^3$ and $0.36 \pm 0.24$ cm$^3$ respectively (IOV = $0.41 \pm 0.05$ cm$^3$). 3D CNNs were more accurate than 2D CNNs in the case of normal ventricles with Dice of $0.797 \pm 0.041$ against $0.776 \pm 0.038$ (IOV = $0.816 \pm 0.009$) and volume errors of $0.35 \pm 0.29$ cm$^3$ against $0.35 \pm 0.24$ cm$^3$ (IOV = $0.2 \pm 0.11$ cm$^3$). The best segmentation time of volumes of size $320 \times 320 \times 320$ was obtained by a 2D CNN in $3.5 \pm 0.2$ s.