Segmentation of brain tumour in 3D Intraoperative Ultrasound imaging

Int J Med Robot. 2021 Dec;17(6):e2320. doi: 10.1002/rcs.2320. Epub 2021 Aug 27.

Abstract

Background: Intraoperative ultrasound (iUS), using a navigation system and preoperative magnetic resonance imaging (pMRI), supports the surgeon intraoperatively in identifying tumour margins. Therefore, visual tumour enhancement can be supported by efficient segmentation methods.

Methods: A semi-automatic and two registration-based segmentation methods are evaluated to extract brain tumours from 3D-iUS data. The registration-based methods estimated the brain deformation after craniotomy based on pMRI and 3D-iUS data. Both approaches use the normalised gradient field and linear correlation of linear combinations metrics. Proposed methods were evaluated on 66 B-mode and contrast-mode 3D-iUS data with metastasis and glioblastoma.

Results: The semi-automatic segmentation achieved superior results with dice similarity index (DSI) values between [85.34, 86.79]% and contour mean distance values between [1.05, 1.11] mm for both modalities and tumour classes.

Conclusions: Better segmentation results were obtained for metastasis detection than glioblastoma, preferring 3D-intraoperative B-mode over 3D-intraoperative contrast-mode.

Keywords: brain tumour extraction; image registration; ultrasound imaging.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Brain / diagnostic imaging
  • Brain Neoplasms* / diagnostic imaging
  • Brain Neoplasms* / surgery
  • Humans
  • Imaging, Three-Dimensional*
  • Magnetic Resonance Imaging
  • Ultrasonography