Initial investigation of predicting hematoma expansion for intracerebral hemorrhage using imaging biomarkers and machine learning

Purpose: Intracerebral Hemorrhage (ICH) is one of the most devastating types of strokes with mortality and morbidity rates ranging from about 51%-65% one year after diagnosis. Early hematoma expansion (HE) is a known cause of worsening neurological status of ICH patients. The goal of this study was to investigate whether non-contrast computed tomography imaging biomarkers (NCCT-IB) acquired at initial presentation can predict ICH growth in the acute stage. Materials and Methods: We retrospectively collected NCCT data from 326 patients with acute (<6 hours) ICH. Four NCCT-IBs (blending region, dark hole, island, and edema) were identified for each hematoma, respectively. HE status was recorded based on the clinical observation reported in the patient chart. Supervised machine learning models were developed, trained, and tested for 15 different input combinations of the NCCT-IBs to predict HE. Model performance was assessed using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve and probability for accurate diagnosis (P-AD) was calculated. A 20-fold Monte-Carlo cross validation was implemented to ensure model reliability on a limited sample size of data, by running a myriad of random training/testing splits. Results: The developed algorithm was able to predict expansion utilizing all four inputs with an accuracy of 70.17%. Further testing of all biomarker combinations yielded P-AD ranging from 0.57, to 0.70. Conclusion: Specific attributes of ICHs may influence the likelihood of HE and can be evaluated via a machine learning algorithm. However, certain parameters may differ in importance to reach accurate conclusions about potential expansion.