Detecting neonatal acute bilirubin encephalopathy based on T1-weighted MRI images and learning-based approaches

Miao Wu,Tingting Liu,Xiaoxia Shen,Yingqun Li,Weihao Zheng,Can Lai,Dan Wu,Chuanbo Yan,Zhongli Shangguan

doi:10.1186/s12880-021-00634-z

Abstract

BackgroundNeonatal hyperbilirubinemia is a common clinical condition that requires medical attention in newborns, which may develop into acute bilirubin encephalopathy with a significant risk of long-term neurological deficits. The current clinical challenge lies in the separation of acute bilirubin encephalopathy and non-acute bilirubin encephalopathy neonates both with hyperbilirubinemia condition since both of them demonstrated similar T1 hyperintensity and lead to difficulties in clinical diagnosis based on the conventional radiological reading. This study aims to investigate the utility of T1-weighted MRI images for differentiating acute bilirubin encephalopathy and non-acute bilirubin encephalopathy neonates with hyperbilirubinemia.Methods3 diagnostic approaches, including a visual inspection, a semi-quantitative method based on normalized the T1-weighted intensities of the globus pallidus and subthalamic nuclei, and a deep learning method with ResNet18 framework were applied to classify 47 acute bilirubin encephalopathy neonates and 32 non-acute bilirubin encephalopathy neonates with hyperbilirubinemia based on T1-weighted images. Chi-squared test and t-test were used to test the significant difference of clinical features between the 2 groups.ResultsThe visual inspection got a poor diagnostic accuracy of 53.58 ± 5.71% indicating the difficulty of the challenge in real clinical practice. However, the semi-quantitative approach and ResNet18 achieved a classification accuracy of 62.11 ± 8.03% and 72.15%, respectively, which outperformed visual inspection significantly.ConclusionOur study indicates that it is not sufficient to only use T1-weighted MRI images to detect neonates with acute bilirubin encephalopathy. Other more MRI multimodal images combined with T1-weighted MRI images are expected to use to improve the accuracy in future work. However, this study demonstrates that the semi-quantitative measurement based on T1-weighted MRI images is a simple and compromised way to discriminate acute bilirubin encephalopathy and non-acute bilirubin encephalopathy neonates with hyperbilirubinemia, which may be helpful in improving the current manual diagnosis.

Highlights

Neonatal hyperbilirubinemia is a common clinical condition that requires medical attention in newborns, which may develop into acute bilirubin encephalopathy with a significant risk of long-term neurological deficits
Deep learning framework we describe the deep learning procedure for classification work. 2 or 3 continuous T1-weighted images (T1WI) slices covered the globus pallidus (GP) from each patient were selected as inputs of the convolutional neural networks (CNN)
Results of Semi‐quantitative diagnosis with normalized T1 intensity The distribution of normalized T1 intensity in GP and subthalamic nucleus (STN) were shown in Fig. 1b and Fig. 1c for the acute bilirubin encephalopathy (ABE) and non-ABE patient groups

Summary

Introduction

Neonatal hyperbilirubinemia is a common clinical condition that requires medical attention in newborns, which may develop into acute bilirubin encephalopathy with a significant risk of long-term neurological deficits. This study aims to investigate the utility of T1-weighted MRI images for differentiating acute bilirubin encephalopathy and non-acute bilirubin encephalopathy neonates with hyperbilirubinemia. Neonatal jaundice, which develops in about 60% of term and 80% of preterm babies during their first week of life, is one of the most common conditions that require medical attention in newborns [1, 2]. Early diagnosis of neonates with a high risk of ABE and timely taking effective intervening measures are very important for pediatricians to minimize the mortality or prevent them from kernicterus

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