The limited accuracy of cerebral infarct detection on CT images caused by the low contrast of CT hinders the desirable application of CT as a first-line diagnostic modality for screening of cerebral infarct. This research was aimed at utilizing convolutional neural network to enhance the accuracy of automated cerebral infarct detection on CT images. The CT images underwent a series of preprocessing steps mainly to enhance the contrast inside the parenchyma, adjust the orientation, spatially normalize the images to the CT template, and create a t-score map for each patient. The input format of the convolutional neural network was the t-score matrix of a 16 × 16-pixel patch. Non-infarcted and infarcted patches were selected from the t-score maps, on which data augmentation was conducted to generate more patches for training and testing the proposed convolutional neural network. The convolutional neural network attained a 93.9% patch-wise detection accuracy in the test set. The proposed method offers prompt and accurate cerebral infarct detection on CT images. It renders a frontline detection modality of ischemic stroke on an emergent or regular basis.
Keywords: acute ischemic stroke; artificial intelligence; cerebral infarct detection; computed tomography; deep learning.