Volumetry of epidural hematomas in computed tomography images: Comparative study between linear and volumetric methods

Abstract

This work evaluates the performance of somemethods employed for assessing the volume ofseven subdural hematomas (EDH), present inmulti-layer computed tomography images. Firstly, a referencevolume is considered to be that obtained by a neurosurgeonusing the manual planimetric method (MPM).Secondly, the volume of the 7 EDHs is obtained consideringboth the original version of the ABC/2 method and two ofits variants, identified in this paper as ABC/3 method and2ABC/3 method. The ABC methods allow for calculationof the volume of the hematoma under the assumptionthat the EDH has an ellipsoidal shape. In third place, anintelligent automatic technique (SAT) is implemented thatgenerates the three-dimensional segmentation of eachEDH and from it the volume of the hematoma is calculated.The SAT consists of the pre-processing, segmentationand post-processing stages. In order to make judgmentsabout the performance of the SAT, the Dice coefficient(Dc) is used to compare the dilated segmentations of theEDH with the EDH segmentations generated manually. Finally,the percentage relative error is calculated as a metricto evaluate the methodologies considered. The resultsshow that the SAT method exhibits the best performancegenerating an average percentage error of less than 2%.