Pericardial Effusion Detection on Post-Mortem Computed Tomography Images Using Convolutional Neural Networks

Pericardial effusion can be a sign of significant underlying diease and, in some cases, may lead to death. Post-mortem computed tomography (PMCT) is a well-established tool to assist death investigation processes in the forensic setting. In practice, the scarcity of well-trained radiologists is a challenge in processing raw whole-body PMCT images for pericardial effusion detection. In this work, we propose a Pericardial Effusion Automatic Detection (PEAD) framework to automatically process raw whole-body PMCT images to filter out the irrelevant images with heart organ absent and focus on pericardial effusion detection. In PEAD, the standard convolutional neural network architectures of VGG and ResNet are carefully modified to fit the specific characteristics of PMCT images. The experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed framework and modified models. The modified VGG and ResNet models achieved superior detection accuracy than the standard architecture with reduced processing speed.