Spectroscopic based approach to identify and quantify cerebral microhemorrhages

Cerebral microhemorrhages (CMHs) are associated with cognitive impairment and several conditions, diseases, and normal aging processes. Current histological methods manually identify and quantify Prussian blue-stained CMHs, which can take months to complete. To speed up this labor-intensive process, we developed a spectroscopic, semi-automated approach. We used the ratio of the red and green intensities relative to the blue intensity squared to discriminate CMH-pixels from background pixels. We calculated a sensitivity and specificity of 83.75% and 99.74%, respectively. The intraclass correlation coefficient was 0.992 (95% confidence interval: 0.989-0.995). Future studies are needed to test if this approach works in other CMH models.