Large vessel occlusion detection by non-contrast CT using artificial ıntelligence

Computer vision models have been used to diagnose some disorders using computer tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) images. In this work, our objective is to detect large and small brain vessel occlusion using a deep feature engineering model in acute of ischemic stroke.

We use our dataset. which contains 324 patient’s CT images with two classes; these classes are large and small brain vessel occlusion. We divided the collected image into horizontal and vertical patches. Then, pretrained AlexNet was utilized to extract deep features. Here, fc6 and fc7 (sixth and seventh fully connected layers) layers have been used to extract deep features from the created patches. The generated features from patches have been concatenated/merged to generate the final feature vector. In order to select the best combination from the generated final feature vector, an iterative selector (iterative neighborhood component analysis—INCA) has been used, and this selector has chosen 43 features. These 43 features have been used for classification. In the last phase, we used a kNN classifier with tenfold cross-validation.

By using 43 features and a kNN classifier, our AlexNet-based deep feature engineering model surprisingly attained 100% classification accuracy.

The obtained perfect classification performance clearly demonstrated that our proposal could separate large and small brain vessel occlusion detection in non-contrast CT images. In this aspect, this model can assist neurology experts with the early recanalization chance.