RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Detection of clustered anomalies in single-voxel morphometry as a rapid automated method for identifying intracranial aneurysms
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2020.07.22.216812
DO 10.1101/2020.07.22.216812
A1 Mark C Allenby
A1 Ee Shern Liang
A1 James Harvey
A1 Maria A Woodruff
A1 Marita Prior
A1 Craig D Winter
A1 David Alonso-Caneiro
YR 2020
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/07/24/2020.07.22.216812.abstract
AB Unruptured intracranial aneurysms (UIAs) are prevalent neurovascular anomalies which, in rare circumstances, rupture to create a catastrophic subarachnoid haemorrhage. Although surgical management can reduce rupture risk, the majority of IAs exist undiscovered until rupture. Current computer-aided UIA diagnoses sensitively detect and measure UIAs within cranial angiograms, but remain limited to low specificities whose output requires considerable neuroradiologist interpretation not amenable to broad screening efforts. To address these limitations, we propose an analysis which interprets single-voxel morphometry of segmented neurovasculature to identify UIAs. Once neurovascular anatomy of a specified resolution is segmented, interrelationships between voxel-specific morphometries are estimated and spatially-clustered outliers are identified as UIA candidates. Our automated solution detects UIAs within magnetic resonance angiograms (MRA) at unmatched 86% specificity and 81% sensitivity using 3 minutes on a conventional laptop. Our approach does not rely on interpatient comparisons or training datasets which could be difficult to amass and process for rare incidentally discovered UIAs within large MRA files, and in doing so, is versatile to user-defined segmentation quality, to detection sensitivity, and across a range of imaging resolutions and modalities. We propose this method as a unique tool to aid UIA screening, characterisation of abnormal vasculature in at-risk patients, morphometry-based rupture risk prediction, and identification of other vascular abnormalities. Graphical AbstractRapid and automated detection of unruptured intracranial aneurysms (UIAs) in MRAsHighly specific, sensitive UIA detection to reduce radiologist input for screeningDetection is versatile to image resolution, modality and has tuneable mm sensitivityCompeting Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.