Abstract
Accurate segmentation of ischemic stroke lesions is crucial for refining diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment planning. Manual identification is time-consuming and challenging, especially in urgent clinical scenarios. This paper presents an innovative deep learning-based system for automated segmentation of ischemic stroke lesions from Computed Tomography Perfusion (CTP) datasets. This paper introduces a deep learning-based system designed to segment ischemic stroke lesions from Computed Tomography Perfusion (CTP) datasets. The proposed approach integrates Edge Enhancing Diffusion (EED) filtering as a preprocessing step, acting as a form of hard attention to emphasize affected regions. Besides the Attention ResUnet (AttResUnet) architecture with a modified decoder path, incorporating spatial and channel attention mechanisms to capture long-range dependencies. The system was evaluated using the ISLES challenge 2018 dataset with a fivefold cross-validation approach. The proposed framework achieved a noteworthy average Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) score of 59%. This performance underscores the effectiveness of combining EED filtering with attention mechanisms in the AttResUnet architecture for accurate stroke lesion segmentation. The fold-wise analysis revealed consistent performance across different data subsets, with slight variations highlighting the model's generalizability. The proposed approach offers a reliable and generalizable tool for automated ischemic stroke lesion segmentation, potentially improving efficiency and accuracy in clinical settings.