Automated Segmentation of Ischemic Stroke Lesions in Non-Contrast Computed Tomography Images for Enhanced Treatment and Prognosis
This addresses the challenge of timely stroke diagnosis in low-resource settings where NCCT is widely available but difficult to interpret, though it appears incremental as it applies an existing framework to a specific medical imaging task.
The researchers tackled the problem of automated ischemic stroke lesion segmentation in non-contrast CT images to enhance early treatment and prognosis, achieving Dice scores of 0.596 (improving to 0.752 after outlier adjustment) and IoU scores of 0.501 (improving to 0.643).
Stroke is the second leading cause of death worldwide, and is increasingly prevalent in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Timely interventions can significantly influence stroke survivability and the quality of life after treatment. However, the standard and most widely available imaging method for confirming strokes and their sub-types, the NCCT, is more challenging and time-consuming to employ in cases of ischemic stroke. For this reason, we developed an automated method for ischemic stroke lesion segmentation in NCCTs using the nnU-Net frame work, aimed at enhancing early treatment and improving the prognosis of ischemic stroke patients. We achieved Dice scores of 0.596 and Intersection over Union (IoU) scores of 0.501 on the sampled dataset. After adjusting for outliers, these scores improved to 0.752 for the Dice score and 0.643 for the IoU. Proper delineation of the region of infarction can help clinicians better assess the potential impact of the infarction, and guide treatment procedures.