Rationale and objectives
To develop a method for automatic localisation of brain lesions on head CT, suitable for both population-level analysis and lesion management in a clinical setting.
Materials and methods
Lesions were located by mapping a bespoke CT brain atlas to the patient’s head CT in which lesions had been previously segmented. The atlas mapping was achieved through robust intensity-based registration enabling the calculation of per-region lesion volumes. Quality control (QC) metrics were derived for automatic detection of failure cases. The CT brain template was built using 182 non-lesioned CT scans and an iterative template construction strategy. Individual brain regions in the CT template were defined via non-linear registration of an existing MRI-based brain atlas.
Evaluation was performed on a multi-centre traumatic brain injury dataset (TBI) (n = 839 scans), including visual inspection by a trained expert. Two population-level analyses are presented as proof-of-concept: a spatial assessment of lesion prevalence, and an exploration of the distribution of lesion volume per brain region, stratified by clinical outcome.
Results
95.7% of the lesion localisation results were rated by a trained expert as suitable for approximate anatomical correspondence between lesions and brain regions, and 72.5% for more quantitatively accurate estimates of regional lesion load. The classification performance of the automatic QC showed an AUC of 0.84 when compared to binarised visual inspection scores. The localisation method has been integrated into the publicly available Brain Lesion Analysis and Segmentation Tool for CT (BLAST-CT).
Conclusion
Automatic lesion localisation with reliable QC metrics is feasible and can be used for patient-level quantitative analysis of TBI, as well as for large-scale population analysis due to its computational efficiency (<2 min/scan on GPU).