Deep Learning for Automated Delineation of Pediatric Cerebral Arteries on Pre-operative Brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Introduction: Surgical resection of brain tumors is often limited by adjacent critical structures such as blood vessels. Current intraoperative navigations systems are limited; most are based on two-dimensional (2D) guidance systems that require manual segmentation of any regions of interest (ROI; eloquent structures to avoid or tumor to resect). They additionally require time- and labor-intensive processing for any reconstruction steps. We aimed to develop a deep learning model for real-time fully automated segmentation of the intracranial vessels on preoperative non-angiogram imaging sequences. Methods: We identified 48 pediatric patients (10-months to 22-years old) with high resolution (0.5–1 mm axial thickness) isovolumetric, pre-operative T2 magnetic resonance images (MRIs). Twenty-eight patients had anatomically normal brains, and 20 patients had tumors or other lesions near the skull base. Manually segmented intracranial vessels (internal carotid, middle cerebral, anterior cerebral, posterior cerebral, and basilar arteries) served as ground truth labels. Patients were divided into 80/5/15% training/validation/testing sets. A modified 2-D Unet convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture implemented with 5 layers was trained to maximize the Dice coefficient, a measure of the correct overlap between the predicted vessels and ground truth labels. Results: The model was able to delineate the intracranial vessels in a held-out test set of normal and tumor MRIs with an overall Dice coefficient of 0.75. While manual segmentation took 1–2 h per patient, model prediction took, on average, 8.3 s per patient. Conclusions: We present a deep learning model that can rapidly and automatically identify the intracranial vessels on pre-operative MRIs in patients with normal vascular anatomy and in patients with intracranial lesions. The methodology developed can be translated to other critical brain structures. This study will serve as a foundation for automated high-resolution ROI segmentation for three-dimensional (3D) modeling and integration into an augmented reality navigation platform.