A new method for predicting the prognosis of ischemic stroke based vascular structure features and lesion location...

Determining the changes in the prognosis of the cerebral infarction area has an important guiding role in the selection of the treatment plan. The goal of this study is to propose a machine learning-based method that can predict the prognosis of stroke effectively and efficiently.

97 cases of stroke were analyzed retrospectively. Firstly, we extracted vascular structural features from computed tomography angiography (CTA) images and stroke location features from diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) images to comprehensively characterize the lesions, respectively. Then, we performed sparse representation-based feature selection and classification to predict the prognosis of stroke based on the extracted features. Finally, we randomly divided the 97 cases into cross-validation set, independent testing set 1 and independent testing set 2 to validate the proposed model.

464 vascular structure features and 116 positional features were extracted. After feature selection, 52 features were finally applied to build the classification model. The proposed model achieved promising prediction performance on the two independent testing sets, with the classification accuracies of 85.19% and 81.25%, respectively.

The proposed machine learning approach can effectively mine and accurately quantify the features related to the prognosis, which include the vascular structural features and the stroke location features. In addition, the established prognostic prediction model based on these features has achieved interesting performances, which may provide valuable guidance for the clinical treatment of stroke.