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Automatic Segmentation of Infant Brain Ventricles with Hydrocephalus in MRI Based on 2.5D U-Net and Transfer Learning

Kenji Ono 1, Yutaro Iwamoto 1, Yen-Wei Chen 1, and Masahiro Nonaka 2
1. Information Science and Engineering, Ritsumeikan University, Shiga, Japan
2. Kansai Medical University, Osaka, Japan

Abstract—The goal of our study is to segment and quantify brain ventricles in infants with hydrocephalus. The Hydrocephalus is a brain disease in which cerebrospinal fluid accumulates in the ventricles, which expand abnormally. The ventricles then press on other brain tissues, leading to the risk of multiple functional and developmental disorders. Segmenting brain ventricles is necessary for early detection and surgical follow-up. Unfortunately, there are few studies on patients with hydrocephalus and infant ventricles are complex and diverse with limited data. Moreover, using conventional automatic segmentation by atlas and machine learning with handcrafted features is difficult to segment the infant brain ventricles with hydrocephalus because of the above data-specific issues. Here, we propose a deep automatic method based on 2.5D U-Net and transfer learning to segment the infant brain ventricles with hydrocephalus. We apply a network architecture that combines low-level features with high-level features to improve learning efficiency, and to maintain the correlation in the slice direction. The input images of the network are multi-slice images (the target slice image and its neighbor slices). Furthermore, we apply transfer learning using adult datasets to deal with limited data and fine-tuning in the hydrocephalus infant datasets. In our experiments, our proposed method outperforms conventional methods and improves the DICE from 58% to 72%.

Index Terms—deep learning, 2.5D, U-net, transfer learning, hydrocephalus infant ventricular, MRI

Cite: Kenji Ono, Yutaro Iwamoto, Yen-Wei Chen, and Masahiro Nonaka, "Automatic Segmentation of Infant Brain Ventricles with Hydrocephalus in MRI Based on 2.5D U-Net and Transfer Learning," Journal of Image and Graphics, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 42-46, June 2020. doi: 10.18178/joig.8.2.42-46

Copyright © 2020 by the authors. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the article is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made.