Stroke Lesion Detection and Analysis in MRI Images Based on Deep Learning

Stroke is a kind of cerebrovascular disease that heavily damages people’s life and health. The quantitative analysis of brain MRI images plays an important role in the diagnosis and treatment of stroke. Deep neural networks with massive data learning ability supply a powerful tool for lesion detection. In order to study the property of the stroke lesions and complete intelligent automatic detection, we collaborated with two authoritative hospitals and collected 5,668 brain MRI images of 300 ischemic stroke patients. All the lesion regions in the images were accurately labeled by professional doctors to ensure the authority and effectiveness of the data. Three categories of deep learning object detection networks including Faster R-CNN, YOLOV3, and SSD are applied to implement automatic lesion detection with the best precision of 89.77%. Meanwhile, statistical analysis of the locations, shapes of the lesions, and possible related diseases is conducted with valid conclusions. The research contributes to the intelligent assisted diagnosis and prevention and treatment of ischemic stroke.