To supply the attending doctor’s diagnosis of the persisting of cerebral small vessel disease and speed up their work effectively, we developed a “deep learning system (DLS)” for cerebral small vessel disease predication. The reliability and the disease area segmentation accuracy, of the proposed DLS, was also investigated.
A deep learning model based on the convolutional neural network was designed and trained on 1,010 DWI b1000 images from 1010 patients diagnosed with segmentation of subcortical infarction, 359 T2∗ images from 359 patients diagnosed with segmentation of cerebral microbleed, as well as 824 T1-weighted and T2-FLAIR images from 824 patients diagnosed with segmentation of lacune and WMH. Dicw accuracy, recall, and f1-score were calculated to evaluate the proposed deep learning model. Finally, we also compared the DLS prediction capability with that of 6 doctors with 3 to 18 years’ clinical experience (8 ± 6 years).
The results support that an appropriately trained DLS can achieve a high-level dice accuracy, 0.598 in the training section over all these four classifications on 30 patients (0.576 for young neuroradiologists), validation accuracy is 0.496 in lacune, 0.666 in WMH, 0.728 in subcortical infarction, and 0.503 in cerebral microbleeds. It is comparable to attending doctor with a few years of experience, regardless of whether the emphasis is placed on the segmentation or detection of lesions with less time-spending compared with manual analysis, about 4.4 s/case, which is dramatically less than doctors about 634 s/case.
The results of our comparison lend support to the case that an appropriately trained DLS can be trusted to the same extent as one would trust an attending doctor with a few years of experience, regardless of whether the emphasis is placed on the segmentation or detection of lesions.