Abstract
Purpose
Automatic bone surfaces segmentation is one of the fundamental tasks of ultrasound (US)-guided computer-assisted orthopedic surgery procedures. However, due to various US imaging artifacts, manual operation of the transducer during acquisition, and different machine settings, many existing methods cannot deal with the large variations of the bone surface responses, in the collected data, without manual parameter selection. Even for fully automatic methods, such as deep learning-based methods, the problem of dataset bias causes networks to perform poorly on the US data that are different from the training set.
Methods
In this work, an intensity-invariant convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture is proposed for robust segmentation of bone surfaces from US data obtained from two different US machines with varying acquisition settings. The proposed CNN takes US image as input and simultaneously generates two intermediate output images, denoted as local phase tensor (LPT) and global context tensor (GCT), from two branches which are invariant to intensity variations. LPT and GCT are fused to generate the final segmentation map. In the training process, the LPT network branch is supervised by precalculated ground truth without manual annotation.
Results
The proposed method is evaluated on 1227 in vivo US scans collected using two US machines, including a portable handheld ultrasound scanner, by scanning various bone surfaces from 28 volunteers. Validation of proposed method on both US machines not only shows statistically significant improvements in cross-machine segmentation of bone surfaces compared to state-of-the-art methods but also achieves a computation time of 30 milliseconds per image, \(98.5\%\) improvement over state-of-the-art.
Conclusion
The encouraging results obtained in this initial study suggest that the proposed method is promising enough for further evaluation. Future work will include extensive validation of the method on new US data collected from various machines using different acquisition settings. We will also evaluate the potential of using the segmented bone surfaces as an input to a point set-based registration method.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Hacihaliloglu I (2017) Ultrasound imaging and segmentation of bone surfaces: a review. Technology 5(02):74–80
Yamauchi M, Kawaguchi R, Sugino S, Yamakage M, Honma E, Namiki A (2009) Ultrasound-aided unilateral epidural block for single lower-extremity pain. J Anesth 23(4):605–608
Seitel A, Sojoudi S, Osborn J, Rasoulian A, Nouranian S, Lessoway VA, Rohling RN, Abolmaesumi P (2016) Ultrasound-guided spine anesthesia: feasibility study of a guidance system. Ultrasound Med Biol 42(12):3043–3049
Anas EMA, Seitel A, Rasoulian A, John PS, Pichora D, Darras K, Wilson D, Lessoway VA, Hacihaliloglu I, Mousavi P, Rohling R, Abolmaesumi P (2015) Bone enhancement in ultrasound using local spectrum variations for guiding percutaneous scaphoid fracture fixation procedures. Int J Comput Assist Radiol Surg 10(6):959–969
Wang P, Patel VM, Hacihaliloglu I (2018) Simultaneous segmentation and classification of bone surfaces from ultrasound using a multi-feature guided CNN. In: International conference on medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention. Springer, pp 134–142
Alsinan AZ, Patel VM, Hacihaliloglu I (2019) Automatic segmentation of bone surfaces from ultrasound using a filter-layer-guided CNN. Int J Comput Assist Radiol Surg 14(5):775–783
Villa M, Dardenne G, Nasan M, Letissier H, Hamitouche C, Stindel E (2018) FCN-based approach for the automatic segmentation of bone surfaces in ultrasound images. Int J Comput Assist Radiol Surg 13(11):1707–1716
Schumann S (2016) State of the art of ultrasound-based registration in computer assisted orthopedic interventions. In: Zheng G, Li S (eds) Computational radiology for orthopaedic interventions. Springer, Cham, pp 271–297
Hacihaliloglu I, Guy P, Hodgson AJ, Abugharbieh R (2015) Automatic extraction of bone surfaces from 3D ultrasound images in orthopaedic trauma cases. Int J Comput Assist Radiol Surg 10(8):1279–1287
Baka N, Leenstra S, van Walsum T (2017) Ultrasound aided vertebral level localization for lumbar surgery. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 36(10):2138–2147
Hacihaliloglu I, Rasoulian A, Rohling RN, Abolmaesumi P (2014) Local phase tensor features for 3-D ultrasound to statistical shape+ pose spine model registration. IEEE Trans Med Imaging 33(11):2167–2179
Ioffe S, Szegedy C (2015) Batch normalization: accelerating deep network training by reducing internal covariate shift. In: Proceedings of the 32nd international conference on machine learning (ICML-15), pp 448–456
Nair V, Hinton GE (2010) Rectified linear units improve restricted Boltzmann machines. In: Proceedings of the 27th international conference on machine learning (ICML-10), pp 807–814
Hacihaliloglu I (2017) Localization of bone surfaces from ultrasound data using local phase information and signal transmission maps. In: International workshop and challenge on computational methods and clinical applications in musculoskeletal imaging. Springer, pp 1–11
Ronneberger O, Fischer P, Brox T (2015) U-net: convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation. In: International conference on medical image computing and computer-assisted intervention. Springer, pp 234–241
Kingma D, Ba J (2015) Adam: a method for stochastic optimization. In: Proceedings of the international conference on learning representations (ICLR)
Pandey P, Patel H, Guy P, Hacihaliloglu I, Hodgson AJ (2019) Preliminary planning for a multi-institutional database for ultrasound bone segmentation. EPiC Ser Health Sci 3:297–300
Funding
This work was supported in part by 2017 North American Spine Society Young Investigator Award.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Ethical approval
All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Wang, P., Vives, M., Patel, V.M. et al. Robust real-time bone surfaces segmentation from ultrasound using a local phase tensor-guided CNN. Int J CARS 15, 1127–1135 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-020-02184-1
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-020-02184-1