Laboratory of Image Science and Technology, Southeast University, Nanjing 210096, China.
Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
Med Image Anal. 2024 Oct;97:103250. doi: 10.1016/j.media.2024.103250. Epub 2024 Jun 25.
Ischemic lesion segmentation and the time since stroke (TSS) onset classification from paired multi-modal MRI imaging of unwitnessed acute ischemic stroke (AIS) patients is crucial, which supports tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) thrombolysis decision-making. Deep learning methods demonstrate superiority in TSS classification. However, they often overfit task-irrelevant features due to insufficient paired labeled data, resulting in poor generalization. We observed that unpaired data are readily available and inherently carry task-relevant cues, but are less often considered and explored. Based on this, in this paper, we propose to fully excavate the potential of unpaired unlabeled data and use them to facilitate the downstream AIS analysis task. We first analyze the utility of features at the varied grain and propose a multi-grained contrastive learning (MGCL) framework to learn task-related prior representations from both coarse-grained and fine-grained levels. The former can learn global prior representations to enhance the location ability for the ischemic lesions and perceive the healthy surroundings, while the latter can learn local prior representations to enhance the perception ability for semantic relation between the ischemic lesion and other health regions. To better transfer and utilize the learned task-related representation, we designed a novel multi-task framework to simultaneously achieve ischemic lesion segmentation and TSS classification with limited labeled data. In addition, a multi-modal region-related feature fusion module is proposed to enable the feature correlation and synergy between multi-modal deep image features for more accurate TSS decision-making. Extensive experiments on the large-scale multi-center MRI dataset demonstrate the superiority of the proposed framework. Therefore, it is promising that it helps better stroke evaluation and treatment decision-making.
对未见证的急性缺血性脑卒中(AIS)患者的配对多模态 MRI 成像进行缺血性损伤分割和发病时间(TSS)分类至关重要,这支持组织型纤溶酶原激活剂(tPA)溶栓决策。深度学习方法在 TSS 分类方面表现出优势。然而,由于配对标记数据不足,它们经常过度拟合与任务无关的特征,导致泛化能力差。我们观察到,未配对数据很容易获得,并且固有地带有与任务相关的线索,但它们较少被考虑和探索。基于此,在本文中,我们提出充分挖掘未配对未标记数据的潜力,并利用它们来促进下游 AIS 分析任务。我们首先分析了不同粒度特征的效用,并提出了一种多粒度对比学习(MGCL)框架,从粗粒度和细粒度水平学习与任务相关的先验表示。前者可以学习全局先验表示,以增强对缺血性损伤的位置感知能力,并感知健康的周围环境,而后者可以学习局部先验表示,以增强对缺血性损伤与其他健康区域之间语义关系的感知能力。为了更好地迁移和利用学习到的与任务相关的表示,我们设计了一个新的多任务框架,以在有限的标记数据下同时实现缺血性损伤分割和 TSS 分类。此外,提出了一种多模态区域相关特征融合模块,以实现多模态深度图像特征之间的特征相关性和协同作用,从而进行更准确的 TSS 决策。在大规模多中心 MRI 数据集上的广泛实验证明了所提出框架的优越性。因此,它有望帮助更好地进行中风评估和治疗决策。