This study reports on the development and evaluation of a novel segmentation method for extracting the internal jugular vein and the adjacent carotid artery from magnetic resonance (MR) images of patients with pulsatile tinnitus. A narrow band level set method with combined shape and appearance constraints was developed and applied to high-resolution MR images from 17 pulsatile tinnitus patients (age 52 ± 23 years, 10 females). The proposed method was validated by comparing with the manual segmentation as well as by identifying the jugular vein and carotid artery based on 4D flow MRI in which the two types of vessels have opposing flow. Our study showed that the vein and artery are in contact with each other on 30.2% of all the slices. Dice value, Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), Hausdorff distance and mean sum of square distance (MSSD) between automatic and manual segmentation were 89.13 ± 2.84%, 27.36 ± 2.39%, 17.2 ± 6.9 mm, 7.4 ± 5.5 mm, demonstrating good segmentation accuracy. The average Dice similarity coefficient and the coefficient of variation compared with 4D flow MRI was 91.42 ± 1.63% and 89.28 ± 4.54% for the internal jugular vein and the carotid artery. The present pipeline for automatic internal jugular vein quantification holds promise for efficient image interpretation in large-scale cohort studies.
Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.