Stroke display extensions: Three forms of visualization

Abstract

The computer-assisted support of acute ischemic stoke detection was the subject of our research reported in this paper. The conditioning of early stroke diagnosis based on CT examinations was analyzed. The multiscale extraction of the subtlest signs of hypodensity which were often undetected in standard CT scan review was presented. Proposed method was as follows: evidence-based description of ischemic changes, the analysis of hypodensity signs across scales, noise reduction and hypodensity extraction, and following display of ischemic changes localized in source brain image space. Important issues were: -extension of the brain tissues for marginal and missing space after deskulling and segmenting of unusual areas; -multiscale transform selection; -denoising in scale-space domain; -visualization conditions fixing. Three forms of extracted stroke sings visualization were proposed. Increased visibility of cerebral ischemia for difficult-in-diagnosis cases was experimentally noticed. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.