A novel center-based deep contrastive metric learning method for the detection of polymicrogyria in pediatric brain MRI

Polymicrogyria (PMG) is a disorder of cortical organization mainly seen in children, which can be associated with seizures, developmental delay and motor weakness. PMG is typically diagnosed on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) but some cases can be challenging to detect even for experienced radiologists. In this study, we create an open pediatric MRI dataset (PPMR) containing both PMG and control cases from the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), Ottawa, Canada. The differences between PMG and control MRIs are subtle and the true distribution of the features of the disease is unknown. This makes automatic detection of potential PMG cases in MRI difficult. To enable the automatic detection of potential PMG cases, we propose an anomaly detection method based on a novel center-based deep contrastive metric learning loss function (cDCM). Despite working with a small and imbalanced dataset our method achieves 88.07% recall at 71.86% precision. This will facilitate a computer-aided tool for radiologists to select potential PMG MRIs. To the best of our knowledge, our research is the first to apply machine learning techniques to identify PMG solely from MRI.

Our code is available at: https://github.com/RichardChangCA/Deep-Contrastive-Metric-Learning-Method-to-Detect-Polymicrogyria-in-Pediatric-Brain-MRI.

Our pediatric MRI dataset is available at: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/lingfengzhang/pediatric-polymicrogyria-mri-dataset.