An Efficient False-Positive Reduction System for Cerebral Microbleeds Detection

Abstract

Cerebral Microbleeds (CMBs) are microhemorrhages caused by certain abnormalities of brain vessels. CMBs can be found in people with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI), Alzheimer’s disease, and in old individuals having a brain injury. Current research reveals that CMBs can be highly dangerous for individuals having dementia and stroke. The CMBs seriously impact individuals’ life which makes it crucial to recognize the CMBs in its initial phase to stop deterioration and to assist individuals to have a normal life. The existing work report good results but often ignores false-positive’s perspective for this research area. In this paper, an efficient approach is presented to detect CMBs from the Susceptibility Weighted Images (SWI). The proposed framework consists of four main phases (i) making clusters of brain Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) using k-mean classifier (ii) reduce false positives for better classification results (iii) discriminative feature extraction specific to CMBs (iv) classification using a five layers convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed method is evaluated on a public dataset available for 20 subjects. The proposed system shows an accuracy of 98.9% and a 1.1% false-positive rate value. The results show the superiority of the proposed work as compared to existing states of the art methods.