Automated Quantification of Brain Lesion Volume From Post-trauma MR Diffusion-Weighted Images.

Determining the volume of brain lesions after trauma is challenging. Manual delineation is observer-dependent and time-consuming and cannot therefore be used in routine practice. The study aimed to evaluate the feasibility of an automated atlas-based quantification procedure (AQP) based on the detection of abnormal mean diffusivity (MD) values computed from diffusion-weighted MR images. The performance of AQP was measured against manual delineation consensus by independent raters in two series of experiments based on: (i) realistic trauma phantoms ( In realistic TBI phantoms, no statistical differences in Dice similarity coefficient, precision and brain lesion volumes were found between AQP, the rater consensus and the ground truth lesion delineations. Similar findings were obtained when comparing AQP and manual annotations for TBI patients. The intra-class correlation coefficient between AQP and manual delineation was 0.70 in realistic phantoms and 0.92 in TBI patients. The volume of brain lesions detected in TBI patients was 59 ml (19-84 ml) (median; 25-75th centiles). Our results support the feasibility of using an automated quantification procedure to determine, with similar accuracy to manual delineation, the volume of low and high MD brain lesions after trauma, and thus allow the determination of the type and volume of edematous brain lesions. This approach had comparable performance with manual delineation by a panel of experts. It will be tested in a large cohort of patients enrolled in the multicenter OxyTC trial (NCT02754063).

Informations de copyright

Copyright © 2022 Mistral, Roca, Maggia, Tucholka, Forbes, Doyle, Krainik, Galanaud, Schmitt, Kremer, Kastler, Troprès, Barbier, Payen and Dojat.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.