Extremely imbalanced subarachnoid hemorrhage detection based on DenseNet-LSTM network with class-balanced loss and transfer learning

Subarachnoid Hemorrhage (SAH) detection is a critical, severe problem that confused clinical residents for a long time. With the rise of deep learning technologies, SAH detection made a significant breakthrough in recent ten years. Whereas, the performances are significantly degraded on imbalanced data, makes deep learning models have always suffered criticism. In this study, we present a DenseNet-LSTM network with Class-Balanced Loss and the transfer learning strategy to solve the SAH detection problem on an extremely imbalanced dataset. Compared to the previous works, the proposed framework not merely effectively integrate greyscale features the and spatial information from the consecutive CT scans, but also employ Class-Balanced loss and transfer learning to alleviate the adverse effects and broaden feature diversity respectively on an extreme SAH cases scarcity dataset, mimicking the actual situation of emergency departments. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on a dataset, consisted of 2,519 cases without hemorrhage cases and only 33 cases with SAH. Experimental results demonstrate the F-measure score of SAH detection achieved a remarkable improvement, the backbone DenseNet121 gained around 33% promotion after transfer learning, and on this basis, importing the Class-Balanced Loss and the LSTM structure, the F-measure score further increased 6.1% and 2.7% sequentially.