Identifying acute ischemic stroke patients within the thrombolytic treatment window using deep learning

Treatment of acute ischemic stroke is heavily contingent upon time, as there is a strong relationship between time clock and tissue progression. Work has established imaging biomarker assessments as surrogates for time since stroke (TSS), namely, by comparing signal mismatch between diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and fluid-attenuated inversion recovery (FLAIR) imaging. Our goal was to develop an automatic technique for determining TSS from imaging that does not require subspecialist radiology expertise.

Using 772 patients (66 ± 9 years, 319 women), we developed and externally evaluated a deep learning network for classifying TSS from MR images and compared algorithm predictions to neuroradiologist assessments of DWI-FLAIR mismatch. Models were trained to classify TSS within 4.5 hours and performance metrics with confidence intervals were reported on both internal and external evaluation sets.

Three board-certified neuroradiologists' DWI-FLAIR mismatch assessments, based on majority vote, yielded a sensitivity of .62, a specificity of .86, and a Fleiss' kappa of .46 when used to classify TSS. The deep learning method performed similarly to radiologists and outperformed previously reported methods, with the best model achieving an average evaluation accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of .726, .712, and .741, respectively, on an internal cohort and .724, .757, and .679, respectively, on an external cohort.

Our model achieved higher generalization performance on external evaluation datasets than the current state-of-the-art for TSS classification. These results demonstrate the potential of automatic assessment of onset time from imaging without the need for expertly trained radiologists.