Automatic Aorta Quantification and Aneurysm Detection using 3D Deep Learning on Large-scale Non-Cardiac-Gated MRI

We present a validated AI technique for quantification of whole aorta diameter from non-cardiac-gated MRI. The mean absolute error between AI-predicted and radiologist-reported diameter is less than 0.27 and 0.249 cm, while Pearson correlation is 0.72 for the ascending (p-value=0.0002) and 0.74 for the descending aorta (p-values=0.0012). SVM classifiers indicated that a 3.15 cm (AUC=0.93) threshold is used to detect a descending aortic aneurysm while a 4.3 cm (AUC=0.92) threshold is used for ascending aortic aneurysm. Large-scale analysis on 3485 individuals showed aortic diameter to increase with age in male and female populations.