Focal cortical dysplasia (type II) detection with multi-modal MRI and a deep-learning framework

Focal cortical dysplasia type II (FCD-II) is a prominent cortical development malformation associated with drug-resistant epileptic seizures that leads to lifelong cognitive impairment. Efficient MRI, followed by its analysis (e.g., cortical abnormality distinction, precise localization assistance, etc.) plays a crucial role in the diagnosis and supervision (e.g., presurgery planning and postoperative care) of FCD-II. Involving machine learning techniques particularly, deep-learning (DL) approaches, could enable more effective analysis techniques. We performed a comprehensive study by choosing six different well-known DL models, three image planes (axial, coronal, and sagittal) of two MRI modalities (T1w and FLAIR), demographic characteristics (age and sex) and clinical characteristics (brain hemisphere and lobes) to identify a suitable DL model for analysing FCD-II. The outcomes show that the DenseNet201 model is more suitable because of its superior classification accuracy, high-precision, F1-score, and large area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve and precision–recall (PR) curve.