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Journal article

A comparison of cranial cavity extraction tools for non-contrast enhanced CT scans in acute stroke patients

Abstract:

Cranial cavity extraction is often the first step in quantitative neuroimaging analyses. However, few automated, validated extraction tools have been developed for non-contrast enhanced CT scans (NECT). The purpose of this study was to compare and contrast freely available tools in an unseen dataset of real-world clinical NECT head scans in order to assess the performance and generalisability of these tools. This study included data from a demographically representative sample of 428 patients who had completed NECT scans following hospitalisation for stroke. In a subset of the scans (n = 20), the intracranial spaces were segmented using automated tools and compared to the gold standard of manual delineation to calculate accuracy, precision, recall, and dice similarity coefficient (DSC) values. Further, three readers independently performed regional visual comparisons of the quality of the results in a larger dataset (n = 428). Three tools were found; one of these had unreliable performance so subsequent evaluation was discontinued. The remaining tools included one that was adapted from the FMRIB software library (fBET) and a convolutional neural network- based tool (rBET). Quantitative comparison showed comparable accuracy, precision, recall and DSC values (fBET: 0.984 ± 0.002; rBET: 0.984 ± 0.003; p = 0.99) between the tools; however, intracranial volume was overestimated. Visual comparisons identified characteristic regional differences in the resulting cranial cavity segmentations. Overall fBET had highest visual quality ratings and was preferred by the readers in the majority of subject results (84%). However, both tools produced high quality extractions of the intracranial space and our findings should improve confidence in these automated CT tools. Pre- and post-processing techniques may further improve these results.

Publication status:
Published
Peer review status:
Peer reviewed

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Publisher copy:
10.1007/s12021-021-09534-7

Authors

More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MSD
Department:
Clinical Neurosciences
Role:
Author
ORCID:
0000-0002-2846-4101
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MSD
Department:
Experimental Psychology
Role:
Author
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MSD
Department:
Clinical Neurosciences
Role:
Author
ORCID:
0000-0003-0751-9844
More by this author
Role:
Author
ORCID:
0000-0003-2189-443X
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MSD
Department:
Clinical Neurosciences
Role:
Author


More from this funder
Funder identifier:
https://ror.org/0187kwz08
Grant:
SAPGF18/100031


Publisher:
Springer
Journal:
Neuroinformatics More from this journal
Volume:
20
Issue:
3
Pages:
587-598
Publication date:
2021-09-06
Acceptance date:
2021-06-14
DOI:
EISSN:
1559-0089
ISSN:
1539-2791
Pmid:
34490589


Language:
English
Keywords:
Pubs id:
1196469
Local pid:
pubs:1196469
Deposit date:
2025-04-23
ARK identifier:

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