Prediction of rupture risk in anterior communicating artery aneurysms with a feed-forward artificial neural network

Anterior communicating artery (ACOM) aneurysms are the most common intracranial aneurysms, and predicting their rupture risk is challenging. We aimed to predict this risk using a two-layer feed-forward artificial neural network (ANN).

594 ACOM aneurysms, 54 unruptured and 540 ruptured, were reviewed. A two-layer feed-forward ANN was designed for ACOM aneurysm rupture-risk analysis. To improve ANN efficiency, an adaptive synthetic (ADASYN) sampling approach was applied to generate more synthetic data for unruptured aneurysms. Seventeen parameters (13 morphological parameters of ACOM aneurysm measured from these patients' CT angiography (CTA) images, two demographic factors, and hypertension and smoking histories) were adopted as ANN input.

Age, vessel size, aneurysm height, perpendicular height, aneurysm neck size, aspect ratio, size ratio, aneurysm angle, vessel angle, aneurysm projection, A1 segment configuration, aneurysm lobulations and hypertension were significantly different between the ruptured and unruptured groups. Areas under the ROC curve for training, validating, testing and overall data sets were 0.953, 0.937, 0.928 and 0.950, respectively. Overall prediction accuracy for raw 594 samples was 94.8 %.

This ANN presents good performance and offers a valuable tool for prediction of rupture risk in ACOM aneurysms, which may facilitate management of unruptured ACOM aneurysms.

• A feed-forward ANN was designed for the prediction of rupture risk in ACOM aneurysms. • Two demographic parameters, 13 morphological aneurysm parameters, and hypertension/smoking history were acquired. • An ADASYN sampling approach was used to improve ANN quality. • Overall prediction accuracy of 94.8 % for the raw samples was achieved.