Assessment of germinal matrix hemorrhage on head ultrasound with deep learning algorithms

Germinal matrix hemorrhage-intraventricular hemorrhage is among the most common intracranial complications in premature infants. Early detection is important to guide clinical management for improved patient prognosis.

The purpose of this study was to assess whether a convolutional neural network (CNN) can be trained via transfer learning to accurately diagnose germinal matrix hemorrhage on head ultrasound.

Over a 10-year period, 400 head ultrasounds performed in patients ages 6 months or younger were reviewed. Key sagittal images at the level of the caudothalamic groove were obtained from 200 patients with germinal matrix hemorrhage and 200 patients without hemorrhage; all images were reviewed by a board-certified pediatric radiologist. One hundred cases were randomly allocated from the total for validation and an additional 100 for testing of a CNN binary classifier. Transfer learning and data augmentation were used to train the model.

The median age of patients was 0 weeks old with a median gestational age of 30 weeks. The final trained CNN model had a receiver operating characteristic area under the curve of 0.92 on the validation set and accuracy of 0.875 on the test set, with 95% confidence intervals of [0.86, 0.98] and [0.81, 0.94], respectively.

A CNN trained on a small set of images with data augmentation can detect germinal matrix hemorrhage on head ultrasounds with strong accuracy.