Cerebral Microbleeds Detection Based on 3D Convolutional Neural Network

Meng Zhao, Chen Jin, Lingmin Jin, Shenghua Teng, Zuoyong Li

Abstract: Cerebral microbleeds (CMBs) are important imaging and diagnostic biomarkers for cerebrovascular diseases and cognitive dysfunctions. Reliable detection of the location and amount of CMBs in brain tissue is crucial for the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of related diseases, where traditional Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has been applied but may fail to achieve high enough detection accuracy. To alleviate this issue, we utilize 3D Fully Convolutional Networks (FCN) and 3D AlexNet to establish a cascade coarse-to-fine detection manner. Specifically, CMBs candidates are first screened out using 3D FCN, followed by 3D AlexNet which extracts the spatial features of CMBs and distinguishes the false positive samples from candidate regions. Experimental results show that the proposed method can realize precise detection of CMBs in magnetic resonance images (MRI) by improving detection sensitivity and reducing false positive samples.