Shortcomings of ventricle segmentation using deep convolutional networks

Abstract

Normal Pressure Hydrocephalus (NPH) is a brain disorder that can present with ventriculomegaly and dementia-like symptoms, which often can be reversed through surgery. Having accurate segmentation of the ventricular system into its sub-compartments from magnetic resonance images (MRI) would be beneficial to better characterize the condition of NPH patients. Previous segmentation algorithms need long processing time and often fail to accurately segment severely enlarged ventricles in NPH patients. Recently, deep convolutional neural network (CNN) methods have been reported to have fast and accurate performance on medical image segmentation tasks. In this paper, we present a 3D U-net CNN-based network to segment the ventricular system in MRI. We trained three networks on different data sets and compared their performances. The networks trained on healthy controls (HC) failed in patients with NPH pathology, even in patients with normal appearing ventricles. The network trained on images from HC and NPH patients provided superior performance against state-of-the-art methods when evaluated on images from both data sets.