Automatic detection of intracranial aneurysm using LBP and Fourier descriptor in angiographic images

Intracranial aneurysms (IA) are abnormal dilatation of the arteries at the circle of Willis whose rupture can lead to catastrophic complications such as hemorrhagic stroke. The purpose of this work is to detect IA in 2D-DSA images. The proposed detection framework uses local binary patterns for the determination of initial aneurysm candidates and generic Fourier descriptor (GFD) for false positive removal.

Here, the designed framework takes DSA images including IA as input and produces images where the IA is clearly identified and localized. The multi-step approach is defined as the following: The first phase presents the determination of initial aneurysm candidates using the uniform local binary patterns (LBPs). The LBPs are calculated from these images in order to identify texture contents of both aneurysm and no-aneurysm classes. The second phase presents the false positives removal using a shape descriptor based on contours: the GFD.

We demonstrated that the proposed detection method successfully recognized morphological features of intracranial aneurysm. The results demonstrated excellent agreement between manual and automated detections. With the computerized IA detection framework, all aneurysms were correctly detected with zero false negative and low FP rates.

This study shows the potential of LBP and GFD as a feature descriptors and paves the way for a whole image analysis tool to predict intracranial aneurysm risk of rupture.