Frontiers in Neuroscience (Mar 2023)

Unified ICH quantification and prognosis prediction in NCCT images using a multi-task interpretable network

  • Kai Gong,
  • Qian Dai,
  • Jiacheng Wang,
  • Yingbin Zheng,
  • Tao Shi,
  • Jiaxing Yu,
  • Jiangwang Chen,
  • Shaohui Huang,
  • Zhanxiang Wang

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2023.1118340
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 17

Abstract

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With the recent development of deep learning, the regression, classification, and segmentation tasks of Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) using Non-Contrast head Computed Tomography (NCCT) for spontaneous IntraCerebral Hematoma (ICH) have become popular in the field of emergency medicine. However, a few challenges such as time-consuming of ICH volume manual evaluation, excessive cost demanding patient-level predictions, and the requirement for high performance in both accuracy and interpretability remain. This paper proposes a multi-task framework consisting of upstream and downstream components to overcome these challenges. In the upstream, a weight-shared module is trained as a robust feature extractor that captures global features by performing multi-tasks (regression and classification). In the downstream, two heads are used for two different tasks (regression and classification). The final experimental results show that the multi-task framework has better performance than single-task framework. And it also reflects its good interpretability in the heatmap generated by Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM), which is a widely used model interpretation method, and will be presented in subsequent sections.

Keywords