Multi-task learning for the automatic grading of enlarged perivascular space burden using MRI

Jesse Phitidis, William N. Whiteley, Joanna M. Wardlaw, Miguel O. Bernabeu, Yajun Cheng +9

Enlarged perivascular spaces (PVS) visible in brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) are increasingly thought to be linked to poor brain health. PVS are elongated structures of less than 3 mm in diameter and can be numerous. To reflect the incidence of PVS, radiologists visually score their burden following a clinical grading scale - a task that would benefit from automation to accelerate analyses and overcome the influence of inter-observer differences. We developed and evaluated methods for training machine learning models to score PVS incidence in the basal ganglia (BG) and centrum semiovale (CSO) leveraging the Potters/Wardlaw scale. The novelty in our work lies in the use of imperfect, semi-automatically generated "silver-standard" PVS segmentation masks during training, in addition to PVS radiological scores. We comparatively evaluated a conditional convolutional neural network (CNN) which accepts PVS masks as an extra input channel, a multi-task CNN which performs both PVS segmentation and scoring, and a logistic regression model which utilises features derived from PVS masks to predict PVS scores. Multi-task learning was the most effective method, achieving a mean average…