New approach to detect and classify stroke in skull CT images via analysis of brain tissue densities.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Cerebral vascular accident (CVA), also known as stroke, is an important health problem worldwide and it affects 16 million people worldwide every year. About 30% of those that have a stroke die and 40% remain with serious physical limitations. However, recovery in the damaged region is possible if treatment is performed immediately. In the case of a stroke, Computed Tomography (CT) is the most appropriate technique to confirm the occurrence and to investigate its extent and severity. Stroke is an emergency problem for which early identification and measures are difficult; however, computer-aided diagnoses (CAD) can play an important role in obtaining information imperceptible to the human eye. Thus, this work proposes a new method for extracting features based on radiological density patterns of the brain, called Analysis of Brain Tissue Density (ABTD).

METHODS: The proposed method is a specific approach applied to CT images to identify and classify the occurrence of stroke diseases. The evaluation of the results of the ABTD extractor proposed in this paper were compared with extractors already established in the literature, such as features from Gray-Level Co-Occurrence Matrix (GLCM), Local binary patterns (LBP), Central Moments (CM), Statistical Moments (SM), Hu's Moment (HM) and Zernike's Moments (ZM). Using a database of 420 CT images of the skull, each extractor was applied with the classifiers such as MLP, SVM, kNN, OPF and Bayesian to classify if a CT image represented a healthy brain or one with an ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke.

RESULTS: ABTD had the shortest extraction time and the highest average accuracy (99.30%) when combined with OPF using the Euclidean distance. Also, the average accuracy values for all classifiers were higher than 95%.

CONCLUSIONS: The relevance of the results demonstrated that the ABTD method is a useful algorithm to extract features that can potentially be integrated with CAD systems to assist in stroke diagnosis.