3D Convolutional Neural Networks for Stalled Brain Capillary Detection
This work addresses the need for efficient and accurate detection of stalled blood vessels in brain images, which is crucial for research on Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline, representing a domain-specific advancement.
The paper tackled the problem of automatically detecting stalled capillaries in 3D brain images, which is tedious and error-prone when done manually, by developing a deep learning approach based on 3D convolutional neural networks that achieved state-of-the-art results, including a 0.85 Matthews correlation coefficient, 85% sensitivity, and 99.3% specificity in a competition.
Adequate blood supply is critical for normal brain function. Brain vasculature dysfunctions such as stalled blood flow in cerebral capillaries are associated with cognitive decline and pathogenesis in Alzheimer's disease. Recent advances in imaging technology enabled generation of high-quality 3D images that can be used to visualize stalled blood vessels. However, localization of stalled vessels in 3D images is often required as the first step for downstream analysis, which can be tedious, time-consuming and error-prone, when done manually. Here, we describe a deep learning-based approach for automatic detection of stalled capillaries in brain images based on 3D convolutional neural networks. Our networks employed custom 3D data augmentations and were used weight transfer from pre-trained 2D models for initialization. We used an ensemble of several 3D models to produce the winning submission to the Clog Loss: Advance Alzheimer's Research with Stall Catchers machine learning competition that challenged the participants with classifying blood vessels in 3D image stacks as stalled or flowing. In this setting, our approach outperformed other methods and demonstrated state-of-the-art results, achieving 0.85 Matthews correlation coefficient, 85% sensitivity, and 99.3% specificity. The source code for our solution is made publicly available.