journal article·2025-09-04Open access

Ensembling Transformer-Based Models for 3D Ischemic Stroke Segmentation in Non-Contrast CT

Lyailya Cherikbayeva, Vladimir Berikov, Zarina Melis, Arman Yeleussinov, Dametken Baigozhanova, Nurbolat Tasbolatuly, Zhanerke Temirbekova, Denis Mikhailapov

Applied Sciences· Volume 15· Issue 17

Abstract

Ischemic stroke remains one of the leading causes of mortality and disability, and accurate segmentation of the affected areas on CT brain images plays a crucial role in timely diagnosis and clinical decision-making. This study proposes an ensemble approach based on the combination of the transformer-based models SE-UNETR and Swin UNETR using a weighted voting strategy. Its performance was evaluated using the Dice similarity coefficient, which quantifies the overlap between the predicted lesion regions and the ground-truth annotations. In this study, three-dimensional CT scans of the brain from 98 patients with a confirmed diagnosis of acute ischemic stroke were used. The data were provided by the International Tomography Center, SB RAS. The experimental results demonstrated that the ensemble based on transformer models significantly outperforms each individual model, providing more stable and accurate predictions. The final Dice coefficient reached 0.7983, indicating the high effectiveness of the proposed approach for ischemic lesion segmentation in CT images. The analysis showed more precise delineation of ischemic lesion boundaries and a reduction in segmentation errors. The proposed method can serve as an effective tool in automated stroke diagnosis systems and other applications requiring high-accuracy medical image analysis.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Medical Image Segmentation Techniques · Medical Imaging and Analysis · Brain Tumor Detection and Classification

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Department of Computer Science, Al-Farabi Kazakh National University, Almaty 050040, Kazakhstan

Department of Mechanics and Mathematics, Novosibirsk State University, 630090 Novosibirsk, Russia

Sobolev Institute of Mathematics SB RAS, 630090 Novosibirsk, Russia

Higher School of Information Technology and Engineering, Astana International University, Astana 010000, Kazakhstan

Department of Computer Engineering, Astana IT University, Astana 010000, Kazakhstan

Funding

Committee of Science of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan

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