Beyin Bilgisayarlı Tomografi Görüntülerinde Derin Öğrenme Tabanlı İskemik İnme Hastalığı Segmentasyonu

Stroke is brain cell death because of either lack of blood flow (ischemic) or bleeding (hemorrhagic) that prevents the brain from functioning properly in both conditions. Ischemic stroke is a common type of stroke caused by a blockage in the cerebrovascular system that prevents blood from flowing to brain regions and directly blocks blood vessels. Computed tomography (CT) scanning is frequently used in the evaluation of stroke, and rapid and accurate diagnosis of ischemic stroke with CT images is critical for determining the appropriate treatment. The manual diagnosis of ischemic stroke can be error-prone due to several factors, such as the busy schedules of specialists and the large number of patients admitted to healthcare facilities. Therefore, in this paper, a deep learning-based interface was developed to automatically diagnose the ischemic stroke through segmentation on CT images leading to a reduction on the diagnosis time and workload of specialists. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) allow automatic feature extraction in ischemic stroke segmentation, utilized to mark the disease regions from CT images. CNN-based architectures, such as U-Net, U-Net VGG16, U-Net VGG19, Attention U-Net, and ResU-Net, were used to benchmark the ischemic stroke disease segmentation. To further improve the segmentation performance, ResU-Net was modified, adding a dilation convolution layer after the last layer of the architecture. In addition, data augmentation was performed to increase the number of images in the dataset, including the ground truths for the ischemic stroke disease region. Based on the experimental results, our modified ResU-Net with a dilation convolution provides the highest performance for ischemic stroke segmentation in dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and intersection over union (IoU) with 98.45 % and 96.95 %, respectively. The experimental results show that our modified ResU-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for ischemic stroke disease segmentation. Moreover, the modified architecture has been deployed into a new desktop application called BrainSeg, which can support specialists during the diagnosis of the disease by segmenting ischemic stroke.