Temporal-Spatial Feature Extraction of DSA Video and Its Application in AVM Diagnosis

Abstract

Objectives: Brain arteriovenous malformation (AVM) is one of the most common causes of intracranial hemorrhage in young adults, and its expeditious diagnosis on digital subtraction angiography (DSA) is essential for clinical decision-making. This paper firstly proposed a deep learning network to extract vascular time-domain features from DSA videos. Then, the temporal features were combined with spatial radiomics features to build an AVM-assisted diagnosis model. Materials and method: Anteroposterior position (AP) DSA videos from 305 patients, 153 normal and 152 with AVM, were analyzed. A deep learning network based on Faster-RCNN was proposed to track important vascular features in DSA. Then the appearance order of important vascular structures was quantified as the temporal features. The structure distribution and morphological features of vessels were quantified as 1,750 radiomics features. Temporal features and radiomics features were fused in a classifier based on sparse representation and support vector machine. An AVM diagnosis and grading system that combined the temporal and spatial radiomics features of DSA was finally proposed. Accuracy (ACC), sensitivity (SENS), specificity (SPEC), and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) were calculated to evaluate the performance of the radiomics model. Results: For cerebrovascular structure detection, the average precision (AP) was 0.922, 0.991, 0.769, 0.899, and 0.929 for internal carotid artery, Willis circle, vessels, large veins, and venous sinuses, respectively. The mean average precision (mAP) of five time phases was 0.902. For AVM diagnosis, the models based on temporal features, radiomics features, and combined features achieved AUC of 0.916, 0.918, and 0.942, respectively. In the AVM grading task, the proposed combined model also achieved AUC of 0.871 in the independent testing set. Conclusion: DSA videos provide rich temporal and spatial distribution characteristics of cerebral blood vessels. Clinicians often interpret these features based on subjective experience. This paper proposes a scheme based on deep learning and traditional machine learning, which effectively integrates the complex spatiotemporal features in DSA, and verifies the value of this scheme in the diagnosis of AVM.

Keywords: Faster-RCNN; arteriovenous malformation; digital subtraction angiography; radiomics approach; real-time image; temporal features.