Label-efficient deep semantic segmentation of intracranial hemorrhages in CT-scans

Intracranial hemorrhage (ICH) is a common finding in traumatic brain injury (TBI) and computed tomography (CT) is considered the gold standard for diagnosis. Automated detection of ICH provides clinical value in diagnostics and in the ability to feed robust quantification measures into future prediction models. Several studies have explored ICH detection and segmentation but the research process is somewhat hindered due to a lack of open large and labeled datasets, making validation and comparison almost impossible. The complexity of the task is further challenged by the heterogeneity of ICH patterns, requiring a large number of labeled data to train robust and reliable models. Consequently, due to the labeling cost, there is a need for label-efficient algorithms that can exploit easily available unlabeled or weakly-labeled data. Our aims for this study were to evaluate whether transfer learning can improve ICH segmentation performance and to compare a variety of transfer learning approaches that harness unlabeled and weakly-labeled data. Three self-supervised and three weakly-supervised transfer learning approaches were explored. To be used in our comparisons, we also manually labeled a dataset of 51 CT scans. We demonstrate that transfer learning improves ICH segmentation performance on both datasets. Unlike most studies on ICH segmentation our work relies exclusively on publicly available datasets, allowing for easy comparison of performances in future studies. To further promote comparison between studies, we also present a new public dataset of ICH-labeled CT scans, Seq-CQ500.