Automated Brain Metastases Detection Framework for T1-Weighted Contrast-Enhanced 3D MRI

Brain Metastases (BM) complicate 20-40% of cancer cases. BM lesions can present as punctate (1 mm) foci, requiring high-precision Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) in order to prevent inadequate or delayed BM treatment. However, BM lesion detection remains challenging partly due to their structural similarities to normal structures (e.g., vasculature). We propose a BM-detection framework using a single-sequence gadolinium-enhanced T1-weighted 3D MRI dataset. The framework focuses on the detection of smaller (3. For 90% BM-detection sensitivity, the framework produced on average 9.12 false-positive BM detections per patient (standard deviation of 3.49); for 85% sensitivity, the average number of false-positives declined to 5.85. Comparative analysis showed that the framework produces comparable BM-detection accuracy with the state-of-art approaches validated for significantly larger lesions.