Abstract Human brain is a set of four communicating network of ventricles heaving with cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) which is located inside the brain parenchyma. An efficient segmentation of cerebral lateral ventricles one in each hemisphere can support the study of efficient pathologies for successful conclusion of various diseases. In this paper, an efficient and fast energy optimised technique for volumetric segmentation of lateral ventricles from MR images of human brain is proposed which is based on geodesic active contours using level set method. The proposed approach consists of mainly four main stages: 1. Preprocessing stage, 2. Presegmentation stage, 3. Contour Evolution with Energy optimisation stage, 4. Termination stage. Experiments on multislice MRI data obtained dice coefficient of 0.955, jaccard coefficient of 0.915 and other surface distance measures demonstrate the advantages of the proposed approach in both accuracy and efficiency.