Assessment of the stability of intracranial aneurysms using a deep learning model based on computed tomography angiography.

Purpose: Assessment of the stability of intracranial aneurysms is important in the clinic but remains challenging. The aim of this study was to construct a deep learning model (DLM) to identify unstable aneurysms on computed tomography angiography (CTA) images.

Methods: The clinical data of 1041 patients with 1227 aneurysms were retrospectively analyzed from August 2011 to May 2021. Patients with aneurysms were divided into unstable (ruptured, evolving and symptomatic aneurysms) and stable (fortuitous, nonevolving and asymptomatic aneurysms) groups and randomly divided into training (833 patients with 991 aneurysms) and internal validation (208 patients with 236 aneurysms) sets. One hundred and ninety-seven patients with 229 aneurysms from another hospital were included in the external validation set. Six models based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) or logistic regression were constructed on the basis of clinical, morphological and deep learning (DL) features. The area under the curve (AUC), accuracy, sensitivity and specificity were calculated to evaluate the discriminating ability of the models.

Results: The AUCs of Models A (clinical), B (morphological) and C (DL features from the CTA image) in the external validation set were 0.5706, 0.9665 and 0.8453, respectively. The AUCs of Model D (clinical and DL features), Model E (clinical and morphological features) and Model F (clinical, morphological and DL features) in the external validation set were 0.8395, 0.9597 and 0.9696, respectively.

Conclusions: The CNN-based DLM, which integrates clinical, morphological and DL features, outperforms other models in predicting IA stability. The DLM has the potential to assess IA stability and support clinical decision-making.