Automatic C-plane detection in pelvic floor transperineal lolumetric ultrasound

Authors

Helena Williams, University Hospitals Leuven & King’s College London & KU Leuven
Laura Cattani, University Hospitals LeuvenFollow
Mohammad Yaqub, Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial IntelligenceFollow
Carole Sudre, King's College London
Tom Vercauteren, King's College London
Jan Deprest, University Hospitals Leuven
Jan D’hooge, KU Leuven

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Title

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)

Abstract

Transperineal volumetric ultrasound (US) imaging has become routine practice for diagnosing pelvic floor disease (PFD). Hereto, clinical guidelines stipulate to make measurements in an anatomically defined 2D plane within a 3D volume, the so-called C-plane. This task is currently performed manually in clinical practice, which is labour-intensive and requires expert knowledge of pelvic floor anatomy, as no computer-aided C-plane method exists. To automate this process, we propose a novel, guideline-driven approach for automatic detection of the C-plane. The method uses a convolutional neural network (CNN) to identify extreme coordinates of the symphysis pubis and levator ani muscle (which define the C-plane) directly via landmark regression. The C-plane is identified in a postprocessing step. When evaluated on 100 US volumes, our best performing method (multi-task regression with UNet) achieved a mean error of 6.05 mm and 4.81 and took 20 s. Two experts blindly evaluated the quality of the automatically detected planes and manually defined the (gold standard) C-plane in terms of their clinical diagnostic quality. We show that the proposed method performs comparably to the manual definition. The automatic method reduces the average time to detect the C-plane by 100 s and reduces the need for high-level expertise in PFD US assessment.

First Page

136

Last Page

145

DOI

10.1007/978-3-030-60334-2_14

Publication Date

10-1-2020

Keywords

Transperineal volumetric ultrasound, pelvic floor disease, convolutional neural network, plane detection

Comments

IR Deposit conditions:

• OA version (pathway a)
• Accepted version: 12 month embargo
• Must link to published article
• Set statement to accompany deposit

Recommended Citation

H. Williams et al., "Automatic C-plane detection in pelvic floor transperineal lolumetric ultrasound", in Medical Ultrasound, and Preterm, Perinatal and Paediatric Image Analysis, ASMUS 2020, PIPPI 2020, (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, v. 12437), pp. 136-145, 2020. Available: 10.1007/978-3-030-60334-2_14