Automated Detection of Hydrocephalus in Pediatric Head Computed Tomography Using VGG 16 CNN Deep Learning Architecture and Based Automated Segmentation Workflow for Ventricular Volume Estimation.

Abstract

Hydrocephalus, particularly congenital hydrocephalus in infants, remains underexplored in deep learning research. While deep learning has been widely applied to medical image analysis, few studies have specifically addressed the automated classification of hydrocephalus. This study proposes a convolutional neural network (CNN) model based on the VGG16 architecture to detect hydrocephalus in infant head CT images. The model integrates an automated method for ventricular volume extraction, applying windowing, histogram equalization, and thresholding techniques to segment the ventricles from surrounding brain structures. Morphological operations refine the segmentation and contours are extracted for visualization and volume measurement. The dataset consists of 105 head CT scans, each with 60 slices covering the ventricular volume, resulting in 6300 slices. Manual segmentation by three trained radiologists served as the reference standard. The automated method showed a high correlation with manual measurements, with R² values ranging from 0.94 to 0.99. The mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) ranged 3.99 to 11.13%, while the root mean square error (RRMSE) from 4.56 to 13.74%. To improve model robustness, the dataset was preprocessed, normalized, and augmented with rotation, shifting, zooming, and flipping. The VGG16-based CNN used pre-trained convolutional layers with additional fully connected layers for classification, predicting hydrocephalus or normal labels. Performance evaluation using a multi-split strategy (15 independent splits) achieved a mean accuracy of 90.4% ± 1.2%. This study presents an automated approach for ventricular volume extraction and hydrocephalus detection, offering a promising tool for clinical and research applications with high accuracy and reduced observer bias.