Brain midline shift (MLS) is one of the most critical factors to be considered for clinical diagnosis and treatment decision-making for intracranial hemorrhage. Existing computational methods on MLS quantification not only require intensive labeling in millimeter-level measurement but also suffer from poor performance due to their dependence on specific landmarks or simplified anatomical assumptions. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised framework to accurately measure the scale of MLS from head CT scans. We formulate the MLS measurement task as a deformation estimation problem and solve it using a few MLS slices with sparse labels. Meanwhile, with the help of diffusion models, we are able to use a great number of unlabeled MLS data and 2793 non-MLS cases for representation learning and regularization. The extracted representation reflects how the image is different from a non-MLS image and regularization serves an important role in the sparse-to-dense refinement of the deformation field. Our experiment on a real clinical brain hemorrhage dataset has achieved state-of-the-art performance and can generate interpretable deformation fields.
@article{arxiv.2301.00409,
title = {Diffusion Model based Semi-supervised Learning on Brain Hemorrhage Images for Efficient Midline Shift Quantification},
author = {Shizhan Gong and Cheng Chen and Yuqi Gong and Nga Yan Chan and Wenao Ma and Calvin Hoi-Kwan Mak and Jill Abrigo and Qi Dou},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2301.00409},
year = {2023}
}