학술논문

Unsupervised Algorithm for Brain Anomalies Localization in Electromagnetic Imaging
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Computational Imaging IEEE Trans. Comput. Imaging Computational Imaging, IEEE Transactions on. 6:1595-1606 2020
Subject
Signal Processing and Analysis
Computing and Processing
General Topics for Engineers
Geoscience
Imaging
Head
Electromagnetics
Radar imaging
Antennas
Brain modeling
Magnetic heads
Electromagnetic imaging
expected value
head imagining
microwave imaging
statistical fields
stroke localization
machine learning
unsupervised learning
Language
ISSN
2573-0436
2333-9403
2334-0118
Abstract
A brain anomaly localization algorithm in an unsupervised machine learning (ML) framework is presented for electromagnetic brain imaging. The method is based on expected value estimation and takes the advantage of the highly symmetrical human brain. The algorithm processes signals collected from pairs of antennas that are positioned symmetrically around the head, discretizes the imaging domain into pixels, and computes the statistical fields between the antennas on the left and right sides of the head. Then, it concatenates their intensities along the axis normal to the imaging domain to compute the expected value for every pixel. The computed expected values are merged into a matrix containing expected values for all pixels. Pixels with higher intensity show the likelihood of an anomaly being present at that location. The assumption on brain symmetry from the electromagnetic perspective was tested on healthy volunteers using a 14-element array system with a working frequency band of 0.5 - 2.0 GHz. The obtained average similarity is 92% and it confirms the validity of the assumption. The same system is used to test the algorithm on different scenarios in simulations and experiments using realistic 3D head phantoms designed based on MRIs of real patients. The imaging results demonstrate the capability of the proposed algorithm to localize bleeding and estimate its size with less than 10% error in less than a minute, which makes it suitable for real-time use in emergency stroke scenarios.