Streamlining Acute Abdominal Aortic Dissection Management—An AI-based CT Imaging Workflow

Abstract Life-threatening acute aortic dissection (AD) demands timely diagnosis for effective intervention. To streamline intrahospital workflows, automated detection of AD in abdominal computed tomography (CT) scans seems useful to assist humans. We aimed at creating a robust convolutional neural network (CNN)-based pipeline capable of real-time screening for signs of abdominal AD in CT. In this retrospective study, abdominal CT data from AD patients presenting with AD and from non-AD patients were collected ( n 195, AD cases 94, mean age 65.9 years, female ratio 35.8%). A CNN-based algorithm was developed with the goal of enabling a robust, automated, and highly sensitive detection of abdominal AD. Two sets from internal ( n = 32, AD cases 16) and external sources ( n = 1189, AD cases 100) were procured for validation. The abdominal region was extracted, followed by the automatic isolation of the aorta region of interest (ROI) and highlighting of the membrane via edge extraction, followed by classification of the aortic ROI as dissected/healthy. A fivefold cross-validation was employed on the internal set, and an ensemble of the 5 trained models was used to predict the internal and external validation set. Evaluation metrics included receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) and balanced accuracy. The AUC, balanced accuracy, and sensitivity scores of the internal dataset were 0.932 (CI 0.891–0.963), 0.860, and 0.885, respectively. For the internal validation dataset, the AUC, balanced accuracy, and sensitivity scores were 0.887 (CI 0.732–0.988), 0.781, and 0.875, respectively. Furthermore, for the external validation dataset, AUC, balanced accuracy, and sensitivity scores were 0.993 (CI 0.918–0.994), 0.933, and 1.000, respectively. The proposed automated pipeline could assist humans in expediting acute aortic dissection management when integrated into clinical workflows.