Comparison of stroke infarction between CT perfusion and diffusion weighted imaging: preliminary results

In this paper we present preliminary results of comparison of automatic segmentations of the infarct core, between that obtained from CT perfusion (based on time to peak parameter) and diffusion weighted imaging (DWI). For each patient, the two imaging volumes were automatically co-registered to a common frame of reference based on an acquired CT angiography image. The accuracy of image registration is measured by the overlap of the segmented brain from both images (CT perfusion and DWI), measured within their common field of view. Due to the limitations of the study, DWI was acquired as a follow up scan up to a week after initial CT based imaging. However, we found significant overlap of the segmented brain (Jaccard indices of approximately 0.8) and the percentage of infarcted brain tissue from the two modalities were still fairly highly correlated (correlation coefficient of approximately 0.9). The results are promising with more data needed in future for clinical inference.