Background: Brain herniation is one of the fatal outcomes of increased intracranial pressure (ICP). It is caused due to the presence of hematoma or tumor mass in the brain. Ideal midline (iML) divides the healthy brain into two (right and left) nearly equal hemispheres. In the presence of hematoma, the midline tends to shift from its original position to the contralateral side of the mass and thus develops a deformed midline (dML).
New method: In this study, a convolutional neural network (CNN) was used to predict the deformed left and right hemispheres. The proposed algorithm was validated with non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) of (n = 45) subjects with two types of brain hemorrhages - epidural hemorrhage (EDH): (n = 5) and intra-parenchymal hemorrhage (IPH): (n = 40)).
Results: The method demonstrated excellent potential in automatically predicting MLS with the average errors of 1.29 mm by location, 66.4 mm2 by 2D area, and 253.73 mm3 by 3D volume. Estimated MLS could be well correlated with other clinical markers including hematoma volume - R2 = 0.86 (EDH); 0.48 (IPH) and a Radiologist-defined severity score (RSS) - R2 = 0.62 (EDH); 0.57 (IPH). RSS was found to be even better correlated (R2 = 0.98 (EDH); 0.70 (IPH)), hence better predictable by a joint correlation between hematoma volume, midline pixel- or voxel-shift, and minimum distance of (ideal or deformed) midline from the hematoma (boundary or centroid).
Conclusion: All these predictors were computed automatically, which highlighted the excellent clinical potential of the proposed automated method in midline shift (MLS) estimation and severity prediction in hematoma decision support systems.
Keywords: Convolutional neural network; Deformed midline; Midline shift; NCCT.
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