Ischemic Stroke Segmentation and Net Water Uptake Quantification on Multicenter Non-Contrast CT Using Supervised Target-Domain Adaptation

Abstract

Objectives: Quantitative assessment of infarct hypodensity on non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT), including net water uptake (NWU), requires manual or semi-manual lesion delineation, often guided by CT perfusion or diffusion-weighted MRI, limiting clinical applicability. Automated segmentation on NCCT could enable efficient biomarker extraction such as NWU but remains challenging across heterogeneous multicenter data. This study aimed to develop and externally test a domain-aware deep learning framework for ischemic stroke segmentation on NCCT and assess its suitability for NWU quantification. Materials&Methods: In this retrospective multicenter study of 801 patients from four datasets, an nnU-Net-based model was trained on NCCT scans from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and the Acute Ischemic Stroke Dataset. To adapt to new domains, the model was fine-tuned on target-domain subsets from Boston (n=11) and ISLES (n=75), with evaluation on held-out cases not used for fine-tuning. Automated segmentations and NWU values were compared with expert references. Results: For lesions $\geq$ 30 mL, median Dice was 0.68 (Boston) and 0.56 (ISLES). Including smaller lesions, which predominated in ISLES, median Dice was 0.54 (interquartile range [IQR] 0.30-0.70) for acute lesion segmentation (Boston dataset) and 0.20 (IQR 0.03-0.41) for NCCT lesion segmentations when compared to post-treatment infarct (primary target of the ISLES challenge). Automated NWU mean absolute error was 1.37 percentage points (SD 1.61, Boston). Conclusion: Target-domain adaptation supported NCCT-only infarct segmentation across heterogeneous external cohorts, although performance varied across domains. The approach enabled low-error NWU quantification from baseline NCCT without advanced imaging, supporting further prospective clinical evaluation.