A 3D U-Net-Based Approach for Intracranial Aneurysm Detection

Intracranial aneurysm refers to a neoplastic protrusion of the arterial wall caused by a localized abnormal enlargement of the cerebral artery lumen. In clinical practice, patients in the early stage of onset generally have no obvious symptoms, which is very easy to miss diagnosis. In medicine, methods such as MRA, CTA and DSA can be used to display the images of blood vessels. Among them, magnetic resonance angiography (MRA) has the advantages of low cost and small damage to the human body. Which can display the images of blood vessels in the brain. The data set used herein was based on images provided by a three-dimensional time-of-flight magnetic resonance angiography system. The main contributions of this paper are as follows: (1) We improved a classic 3D U-Net model with the combination of attention gate, residual connection, and the changes of size. Which achieved automatic segmentation of aneurysms in MRA. In the detection of aneurysms with mean diameters of 6.10mm and 7.69mm, the sensitivity was 83.4% and 86.4% respectively. (2) On the basis of this sensitivity, we achieved a low false positive rate which was 0.36 FPs/case and 0.34 FPs/case respectively. CCS CONCEPTS • Computing methodologies∼Computer graphics∼Image manipulation∼Image processing