Intracranial Hemorrhage Detection in Head CT Using Double-Branch Convolutional Neural Network, Support Vector Machine, and Random Forest

Abstract

Brain hemorrhage is a severe threat to human life, and its timely and correct diagnosis and treatment are of great importance. Multiple types of brain hemorrhage are distinguished depending on the location and character of bleeding. The main division covers five subtypes: subdural, epidural, intraventricular, intraparenchymal, and subarachnoid hemorrhage. This paper presents an approach to detect these intracranial hemorrhage types in computed tomography images of the head. The model trained for each hemorrhage subtype is based on a double-branch convolutional neural network of ResNet-50 architecture. It extracts features from two chromatic representations of the input data: a concatenation of the image normalized in different intensity windows and a stack of three consecutive slices creating a 3D spatial context. The joint feature vector is passed to the classifier to produce the final decision. We tested two tools: the support vector machine and the random forest. The experiments involved 372,556 images from 11,454 CT series of 9997 patients, with each image annotated with labels related to the hemorrhage subtypes. We validated deep networks from both branches of our framework and the model with either of two classifiers under consideration. The obtained results justify the use of a combination of double-source features with the random forest classifier. The system outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of F1 score. The highest detection accuracy was obtained in intraventricular (96.7%) and intraparenchymal hemorrhages (93.3%).