Deep-Learning-Enabled Microwave-Induced Thermoacoustic Tomography Based on ResAttU-Net for Transcranial Brain Hemorrhage Detection.

Abstract

Hemorrhagic stroke is a leading threat to human's health. The fast-developing microwave-induced thermoacoustic tomography (MITAT) technique holds potential to do brain imaging. However, transcranial brain imaging based on MITAT is still challenging due to the involved huge heterogeneity in speed of sound and acoustic attenuation of human skull. This work aims to address the adverse effect of the acoustic heterogeneity using a deep-learning-based MITAT (DL-MITAT) approach for transcranial brain hemorrhage detection. We establish a new network structure, a residual attention U-Net (ResAttU-Net), for the proposed DL-MITAT technique, which exhibits improved performance as compared to some traditionally used networks. We use simulation method to build training sets and take images obtained by traditional imaging algorithms as the input of the network. We present ex-vivo transcranial brain hemorrhage detection as a proof-of-concept validation. By using an 8.1-mm thick bovine skull and porcine brain tissues to perform ex-vivo experiments, we demonstrate that the trained ResAttU-Net is capable of efficiently eliminating image artifacts and accurately restoring the hemorrhage spot. It is proved that the DL-MITAT method can reliably suppress false positive rate and detect a hemorrhage spot as small as 3 mm. We also study effects of several factors of the DL-MITAT technique to further reveal its robustness and limitations. The proposed ResAttU-Net-based DL-MITAT method is promising for mitigating the acoustic inhomogeneity issue and performing transcranial brain hemorrhage detection. This work provides a novel ResAttU-Net-based DL-MITAT paradigm and paves a compelling route for transcranial brain hemorrhage detection as well as other transcranial brain imaging applications.