A Framework to Assist Acute Stroke Diagnosis

In this paper, we present a framework developed to assist and support treatment and diagnosis of acute stroke patients. We propose to substitute the current clinical study based on manual image editing and manual segmentation of diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) and perfusion weighted imaging (PWI) by an integrated framework with registration, segmentation, manipulation and visualization strategies specifically designed for the DWI/PWI processing. We describe a robust and accurate technique to register DWI/PWI data which uses an acceleration strategy based on uniformly distributed random lines that reduces considerably the processing time. We also propose a segmentation method based on PWI-DWI fused data to detect stroke and hypoperfusion areas that reduces the manual intervention of radiologist. With our approach, the clinical study of an acute stroke patient is reduced from 15/20 minutes to 5 minutes, including the manual editing.