Lateral Ventricle Segmentation of 3D Pre-term Neonates US Using Convex Optimization

Intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) is a common disease among preterm infants with an occurrence of 12-20% in those born at less than 35 weeks gestational age. Neonates at risk of IVH are monitored by conventional 2D ultrasound (US) for hemorrhage and potential ventricular dilation. Compared to 2D US relying on linear measurements from a single slice and visually estimates to determine ventricular dilation, 3D US can provide volumetric ventricle measurements, more sensitive to longitudinal changes in ventricular volume. In this work, we propose a global optimization-based surface evolution approach to the segmentation of the lateral ventricles in preterm neonates with IVH. The proposed segmentation approach makes use of convex optimization technique in combination with a subject-specific shape model. We show that the introduced challenging combinatorial optimization problem can be solved globally by means of convex relaxation. In this regard, we propose a coupled continuous max-flow model, which derives a new and efficient dual based algorithm, that can be implemented on GPUs to achieve a high-performance in numerics. Experiments demonstrate the advantages of our approach in both accuracy and efficiency. To the best of our knowledge, this paper reports the first study on semi-automatic segmentation of lateral ventricles in neonates with IVH from 3D US images.