Indirect Volume Estimation for Acute Ischemic Stroke from Diffusion Weighted Image Using Slice Image Segmentation

The accurate estimation of acute ischemic stroke (AIS) using diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) is crucial for assessing patients and guiding treatment options. This study aimed to propose a method that estimates AIS volume in DWI objectively, quickly, and accurately. We used a dataset of DWI with AIS, including 2159 participants (1179 for internal validation and 980 for external validation) with various types of AIS. We constructed algorithms using 3D segmentation (direct estimation) and 2D segmentation (indirect estimation) and compared their performances with those annotated by neurologists. The proposed pretrained indirect model demonstrated higher segmentation performance than the direct model, with a sensitivity, specificity, F1-score, and Jaccard index of 75.0%, 77.9%, 76.0, and 62.1%, respectively, for internal validation, and 72.8%, 84.3%, 77.2, and 63.8%, respectively, for external validation. Volume estimation was more reliable for the indirect model, with 93.3% volume similarity (VS), 0.797 mean absolute error (MAE) for internal validation, VS of 89.2% and a MAE of 2.5% for external validation. These results suggest that the indirect model using 2D segmentation developed in this study can provide an accurate estimation of volume from DWI of AIS and may serve as a supporting tool to help physicians make crucial clinical decisions.