A Magnetic Resonance Angiography-Based Study Comparing Machine Learning and Clinical Evaluation: Screening Intracranial Regions Associated with the Hemorrhagic Stroke of Adult Moyamoya Disease

Moyamoya disease patients with hemorrhagic stroke usually have a poor prognosis. This study aimed to determine whether hemorrhagic moyamoya disease could be distinguished from MRA images using transfer deep learning and to screen potential regions that contain rich distinguishing information from MRA images in moyamoya disease.A total of 116 adult patients with bilateral moyamoya diseases suffering from hemorrhagic or ischemia complications were retrospectively screened. Based on original MRA images at the level of the basal cistern, basal ganglia, and centrum semiovale, we adopted the pretrained ResNet18 to build three models for differentiating hemorrhagic moyamoya disease. Grad-CAM was applied to visualize the regions of interest.For the test set, the accuracies of model differentiation in the basal cistern, basal ganglia, and centrum semiovale were 93.3%, 91.5%, and 86.4%, respectively. Visualization of the regions of interest demonstrated that the models focused on the deep and periventricular white matter and abnormal collateral vessels in hemorrhagic moyamoya disease.A transfer learning model based on MRA images of the basal cistern and basal ganglia showed a good ability to differentiate between patients with hemorrhagic moyamoya disease and those with ischemic moyamoya disease. The deep and periventricular white matter and collateral vessels at the level of the basal cistern and basal ganglia may contain rich distinguishing information.