Purpose: Intraventricular hemorrhage (IVH) affects nearly 15% of preterm infants. It can lead to ventricular dilation and cognitive impairment. To ablate IVH clots, MR-guided focused ultrasound surgery (MRgFUS) is investigated. This procedure requires accurate, fast and consistent quantification of ventricle and clot volumes.
Methods: We developed a semi-autonomous segmentation (SAS) algorithm for measuring changes in the ventricle and clot volumes. Images are normalized, and then ventricle and clot masks are registered to the images. Voxels of the registered masks and voxels obtained by thresholding the normalized images are used as seed points for competitive region growing, which provides the final segmentation. The user selects the areas of interest for correspondence after thresholding and these selections are the final seeds for region growing. SAS was evaluated on an IVH porcine model. Results: SAS was compared to ground truth manual segmentation (MS) for accuracy, efficiency, and consistency. Accuracy was determined by comparing clot and ventricle volumes produced by SAS and MS, and comparing contours by calculating 95% Hausdorff distances between the two labels. In Two-One-Sided Test, SAS and MS were found to be significantly equivalent (p < 0.01). SAS on average was found to be 15 times faster than MS (p < 0.01). Consistency was determined by repeated segmentation of the same image by both SAS and manual methods, SAS being significantly more consistent than MS (p < 0.05).

Conclusion: SAS is a viable method to quantify the IVH clot and the lateral brain ventricles and it is serving in a large- scale porcine study of MRgFUS treatment of IVH clot lysis.