A dual-path neural network fusing dual-sequence magnetic resonance image features for detection of placenta accrete spectrum (PAS) disorder

Abstract

<abstract> <p>With the increase of various risk factors such as cesarean section and abortion, placenta accrete spectrum (PAS) disorder is happening more frequently year by year. Therefore, prenatal prediction of PAS is of crucial practical significance. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) quality will not be affected by fetal position, maternal size, amniotic fluid volume, etc., which has gradually become an important means for prenatal diagnosis of PAS. In clinical practice, T2-weighted imaging (T2WI) magnetic resonance (MR) images are used to reflect the placental signal and T1-weighted imaging (T1WI) MR images are used to reflect bleeding, both plays a key role in the diagnosis of PAS. However, it is difficult for traditional MR image analysis methods to extract multi-sequence MR image features simultaneously and assign corresponding weights to predict PAS according to their importance. To address this problem, we propose a dual-path neural network fused with a multi-head attention module to detect PAS. The model first uses a dual-path neural network to extract T2WI and T1WI MR image features separately, and then combines these features. The multi-head attention module learns multiple different attention weights to focus on different aspects of the placental image to generate highly discriminative final features. The experimental results on the dataset we constructed demonstrate a superior performance of the proposed method over state-of-the-art techniques in prenatal diagnosis of PAS. Specifically, the model we trained achieves 88.6% accuracy and 89.9% F1-score on the independent validation set, which shows a clear advantage over methods that only use a single sequence of MR images.</p> </abstract>

Comparisons of the diagnostic accuracy of the ultrasonic sign-score method and MRI for PA, PI and PP in high-risk gravid women: a retrospective study

“…In recent decades, the diagnosis and management of placenta accrete spectrum (PAS) has represented a great challenge to obstetricians in clinical practice ( 1 , 2 ). Due to the obscure clinical manifestations and lack of laboratory tests for PAS, there is no method currently available that allows the depth of invasion of PAS to be predicted before surgery or that can distinguish among PA, placenta increta (PI), and placenta percreta (PP) ( 3 ).…”

“…To boost the diagnostic accuracy, particularly for suspected PAS, many obstetricians request MRI examinations in addition to US examinations, as MRI has a higher resolution in the screening of soft tissues ( 2 , 5 ). However, it is not yet known whether MRI is more accurate and informative than the ultrasonic sign-scoring method in the diagnosis of PAS.…”