Deep Learning for Hemorrhagic Lesion Detection and Segmentation on Brain CT Images

Stroke is an acute cerebral vascular disease that is likely to cause long-term disabilities and death. Immediate emergency care with accurate diagnosis of computed tomographic (CT) images is crucial for dealing with a hemorrhagic stroke. However, due to the high variability of a stroke's location, contrast, and shape, it is challenging and time-consuming even for experienced radiologists to locate them. In this paper, we propose a U-net based deep learning framework to automatically detect and segment hemorrhage strokes in CT brain images. The input of the network is built by concatenating the flipped image with the original CT slice which introduces symmetry constraints of the brain images into the proposed model. This enhances the contrast between hemorrhagic area and normal brain tissue. Various Deep Learning topologies are compared by varying the layers, batch normalization, dilation rates, and pre-train models. This could increase the respective filed and preserves more information on lesion characteristics. Besides, the adversarial training is also adopted in the proposed network to improve the accuracy of the segmentation. The proposed model is trained and evaluated on two different datasets, which achieve the competitive performance with human experts with the highest location accuracy 0.9859 for detection, 0.8033 Dice score, and 0.6919 IoU for segmentation. The results demonstrate the effectiveness, robustness, and advantages of the proposed deep learning model in automatically hemorrhage lesion diagnosis, which make it possible to be a clinical decision support tool in stroke diagnosis.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a U-net based deep learning framework for automatic detection and segmentation of hemorrhage strokes in CT brain images. By comparing different Deep Learning topologies, adopting adversarial training, and training and evaluating the model on two different datasets, the effectiveness, robustness, and advantages of the proposed deep learning model in hemorrhage lesion diagnosis have been demonstrated, making it possible to be a clinical decision support tool in stroke diagnosis.