Deep Learning Framework to Detect Ischemic Stroke Lesion in Brain MRI Slices of Flair/DW/T1 Modalities

Abstract

Ischemic stroke lesion (ISL) is a brain abnormality. Studies proved that early detection and treatment could reduce the disease impact. This research aimed to develop a deep learning (DL) framework to detect the ISL in multi-modality magnetic resonance image (MRI) slices. It proposed a convolutional neural network (CNN)-supported segmentation and classification to execute a consistent disease detection framework. The developed framework consisted of the following phases; (i) visual geometry group (VGG) developed VGG16 scheme supported SegNet (VGG-SegNet)-based ISL mining, (ii) handcrafted feature extraction, (iii) deep feature extraction using the chosen DL scheme, (iv) feature ranking and serial feature concatenation, and (v) classification using binary classifiers. Fivefold cross-validation was employed in this work, and the best feature was selected as the final result. The attained results were separately examined for (i) segmentation; (ii) deep-feature-based classification, and (iii) concatenated feature-based classification. The experimental investigation is presented using the Ischemic Stroke Lesion Segmentation (ISLES2015) database. The attained result confirms that the proposed ISL detection framework gives better segmentation and classification results. The VGG16 scheme helped to obtain a better result with deep features (accuracy > 97%) and concatenated features (accuracy > 98%).

Keywords

• ischemic stroke
• brain MRI
• VGG16
• VGG-SegNet
• segmentation
• classification