The Effectiveness of Deep Learning in the Differential Diagnosis of Hemorrhagic Transformation and Contrast Accumulation After Endovascular Thrombectomy in Acute Ischemic Stroke Patients

Objectives: Differentiation of hyperdense areas on non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) images as hemorrhagic transformation (HT) and contrast accumulation (CA) after endovascular thrombectomy (EVT) in acute ischemic stroke (AIS) patients are critical for early antiplatelet and anticoagulant therapy. This study aimed to predict HT and CA on initial NCCT using deep learning. Material and Methods: This study was conducted between January and December 2024. The study included 556 images of 52 patients (21 female and 31 male) who underwent EVT due to AIS, with hyperdense areas observed in the NCCT examination within the first 24 h post-EVT. The evaluated images were labeled as ‘contrast accumulation’ and ‘hemorrhagic transformation’. These labeled images were trained with nine different models under a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture using a large dataset, such as ImageNet. These models are DenseNet201, InceptionResNet, InceptionV3, NASNetLarge, ResNet50, ResNet101, VGG16, VGG19 and Xception. After training the CNN models, their performance was evaluated using accuracy, loss, validation accuracy, validation loss, F1 score, Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) Curve, confusion matrix, confidence interval, and p-value analysis. Results: The models trained in the study were derived from 556 images in data sets obtained from 52 patients; 186 images in training data for CA and 186 images training data for HT (with an increase to 558 images), 115 images used for validation data, and 69 images were compared using test data. In the test set, the Area Under the Curve (AUC) metrics showing sensitivity and specificity values under different cutoff points for the models were as follows: DenseNet201 model AUC = 0.95, InceptionV3 model AUC = 0.93, NasNetLarge model AUC = 0.89, Xception model AUC = 0.91, Inception_ResNet model AUC = 0.84, Resnet50 and Resnet101 models AUC = 0.74. The InceptionV3 model demonstrates the best performance with an F1 score of 0.85. Recall scores generally ranged between 0.62 and 0.85. Conclusions: In our study, hyperdensity areas in initial NCCT images obtained after EVT in AIS patients were successfully differentiated from HT and CA with high accuracy using CNN architectures. Our findings may enable the early identification of patients who would benefit from anticoagulation or antiplatelet therapy to prevent re-occlusion or progression after EVT.