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Paper details
Number 2 - June 2014
Volume 24 - 2014
Assessment of hydrocephalus in children based on digital image processing and analysis
Anna Fabijańska, Tomasz Węgliński, Krzysztof Zakrzewski, Emilia Nowosławska
Abstract
Hydrocephalus is a pathological condition of the central nervous system which often affects neonates and young children.
It manifests itself as an abnormal accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid within the ventricular system of the brain with
its subsequent progression. One of the most important diagnostic methods of identifying hydrocephalus is Computer
Tomography (CT). The enlarged ventricular system is clearly visible on CT scans. However, the assessment of the disease
progress usually relies on the radiologist’s judgment and manual measurements, which are subjective, cumbersome and
have limited accuracy. Therefore, this paper regards the problem of semi-automatic assessment of hydrocephalus using
image processing and analysis algorithms. In particular, automated determination of popular indices of the disease progress
is considered. Algorithms for the detection, semi-automatic segmentation and numerical description of the lesion are
proposed. Specifically, the disease progress is determined using shape analysis algorithms. Numerical results provided by
the introduced methods are presented and compared with those calculated manually by a radiologist and a trained operator.
The comparison proves the correctness of the introduced approach.
Keywords
hydrocephalus, computed tomography, image segmentation, Evans index, frontal and occipital horn ratio, ventricular angle, frontal horn radius