Automatic body localization and brain ventricle segmentation in 3D high frequency ultrasound images of mouse embryos

This paper presents a fully automatic segmentation system for whole-body high-frequency ultrasound (HFU) images of mouse embryos that can simultaneously segment the body contour and the brain ventricles (BVs). Our system first locates a region of interest (ROI), which covers the interior of the uterus, by sub-surface analysis. Then, it segments the ROI into BVs, the body, the amniotic fluid, and the uterine wall, using nested graph cut. Simultaneously multilevel thresholding is applied to the whole-body image to propose candidate BV components. These candidates are further truncated by the embryo mask (body+BVs) to refine the BV candidates. Finally, subsets of all candidate BVs are compared with pre-trained spring models describing valid BV structures, to identify true BV components. The system can segment the body accurately in most cases based on visual inspection, and achieves average Dice similarity coefficient of 0.8924 ± 0.043 for the BVs on 36 HFU image volumes.