A cerebral microbleed diagnosis method via FeatureNet and ensembled randomized neural networks

Abstract Cerebral microbleed (CMB) is a type of biomarker, which is related to cerebrovascular diseases. In this paper, a novel computer aided diagnosis method for CMB detection was presented. Firstly, sliding neighborhood algorithm was used to generate CMB and non-CMB samples from brain susceptibility weighted images. Then, a 15-layer proposed FeatureNet was trained for extracting features from the input samples. Afterwards, structure after the first fully connected layer in FeatureNet was replaced by three randomized neural networks for classification: Schmidt neural network, random vector functional-link net, and extreme learning machine, and the weights and biases in early layers of FeatureNet were frozen during the training of those three classifiers. Finally, the output of the three classifiers was ensemble by majority voting mechanism to get better classification performance. In our experiment, five-fold cross validation was employed for evaluation. Results revealed that our FeatureNet-SNN, FeatureNet-RVFL and FeatureNet-ELM yielded accuracy of 98.22%, 98.23%, and 97.54%, respectively, and the ensembled FeatureNet-EN improved the accuracy to 98.60%, which outperformed several existing state-of-the-art approaches. The proposed FeatureNet-EN model could provide accurate CMB detection, and thus reduce death tolls. Impact Statement — We propose a 15-layer FeatureNet to detect cerebral microbleed (CMB). We propose three FeatureNet variants: FeatureNet-SNN, FeatureNet-RVFL and FeatureNet-ELM. We use ensemble learning to combine three FeatureNet variants, and generate a FeatureNet-EN. The proposed FeatureNet-SNN, FeatureNet-RVFL and FeatureNet-ELM yielded accuracy of 98.22%, 98.23%, and 97.54%, respectively, and the ensembled FeatureNet-EN improved the accuracy to 98.60%, better than state-of-the-art methods. This method could provide accurate CMB detection, and thus reduce death tolls.