Toward human intervention-free clinical diagnosis of intracranial aneurysm via deep neural network

Intracranial aneurysm (IA) is an enormous threat to human health, which often results in nontraumatic subarachnoid hemorrhage or dismal prognosis. Diagnosing IAs on commonly used computed tomographic angiography (CTA) examinations remains laborious and time consuming, leading to error-prone results in clinical practice, especially for small targets. In this study, we propose a fully automatic deep-learning model for IA segmentation that can be applied to CTA images. Our model, called Global Localization-based IA Network (GLIA-Net), can incorporate the global localization prior and generates the fine-grain three-dimensional segmentation. GLIA-Net is trained and evaluated on a big internal dataset (1,338 scans from six institutions) and two external datasets. Evaluations show that our model exhibits good tolerance to different settings and achieves superior performance to other models. A clinical experiment further demonstrates the clinical utility of our technique, which helps radiologists in the diagnosis of IAs.