Submitted:
05 September 2025
Posted:
05 September 2025
You are already at the latest version
Abstract
Keywords:
1. Introduction
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Postmortem Imaging Dataset
2.2. Non-Postmortem Imaging Dataset
2.3. DL Models
2.3.1. Image Processing Steps for Each Case
2.3.2. Inference on Postmortem Images
2.3.3. Evaluation Methods
2.3.4. Statistical Analysis
2.3.5. Reader Study by a Radiology Resident
3. Results
4. Discussion
5. Conclusions
Supplementary Materials
Author Contributions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Acknowledgments
Conflicts of Interest
Abbreviations
| AI | Artificial intelligence |
| AUC | Area under the curve |
| CT | Computed tomography |
| DL | Deep learning |
| MRI | Magnetic resonance imaging |
| ROC | Receiver operating characteristic |
| ROC AUC | Area under the ROC curve |
| RSNA | Radiological Society of North America |
References
- Bolliger, S.A.; Thali, M.J. Imaging and virtual autopsy: looking back and forward. Philos. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B Biol. Sci. 2015, 370, 20140253. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Roberts, I.S.D.; Benamore, R.E.; Benbow, E.W.; Lee, S.H.; Harris, J.N.; Jackson, A.; Mallett, S.; Patankar, T.; Peebles, C.; Roobottom, C.; Traill, Z.C. Post-mortem imaging as an alternative to autopsy in the diagnosis of adult deaths: a validation study. Lancet, Elsevier BV. 2012, 379, 136–142. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Zhou, L.Q.; Wang, J.Y.; Yu, S.Y.; Wu, G.G.; Wei, Q.; Deng, Y.B.; Wu, X.L.; Cui, X.W.; Dietrich, C.F. Artificial intelligence in medical imaging of the liver. World J. Gastroenterol., Baishideng Publishing Group Inc. 2019, 25, 672–682. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Dey, D.; Slomka, P.J.; Leeson, P.; Comaniciu, D.; Shrestha, S.; Sengupta, P.P.; Marwick, T.H. Artificial intelligence in cardiovascular imaging: JACC state-of-the-art review. J. Am. Coll. Cardiol., Elsevier BV. 2019, 73, 1317–1335. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Cui, Y.; Zhu, J.; Duan, Z.; Liao, Z.; Wang, S.; Liu, W. Artificial intelligence in spinal imaging: current status and future directions. Int. J. Environ. Res. Public Health 2022, 19, 11708. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Matsuo, H.; Kitajima, K.; Kono, A.K.; Kuribayashi, K. Kijima, T.; Hashimoto, M.; Hasegawa, S.; Yamakado, K.; Murakami, T. Prognosis prediction of patients with malignant pleural mesothelioma using conditional variational autoencoder on 3D PET images and clinical data. Med. Phys. 2023, 50, 7548–7557. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Matsuo, H.; Nishio, M.; Kanda, T.; Kojita, Y.; Kono, A.K.; Hori, M.; Teshima, M.; Otsuki, N.; Nibu, K.I.; Murakami, T. Diagnostic accuracy of deep-learning with anomaly detection for a small amount of imbalanced data: discriminating malignant parotid tumors in MRI. Sci. Rep., Springer Science and Business Media LLC. 2010, 10, 19388. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Nishio, M.; Noguchi, S.; Matsuo, H.; Murakami, T. Automatic classification between COVID-19 pneumonia, non-COVID-19 pneumonia, and the healthy on chest X-ray image: combination of data augmentation methods. Sci. Rep., Springer Science and Business Media LLC. 2020, 10, 17532. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- Kumari, R.; Nikki, S.; Beg, R.; Ranjan, S.; Gope, S.K.; Mallick, R.R.; Dutta, A. A review of image detection, recognition and classification with the help of machine learning and artificial intelligence. SSRN Journal., Elsevier BV 2020. [CrossRef]
- Flanders, A.E.; Prevedello, L.M.; Shih, G.; Halabi, S.S.; Kalpathy-Cramer, J.; Ball, R.; Mongan, J.T.; Stein, A.; Kitamura, F.C.; Lungren, M.P.; Choudhary, G.; Cala, L.; Coelho, L.; Mogensen, M.; Morón, F.; Miller, E.; Ikuta, I.; Zohrabian, V.; McDonnell, O.; Lincoln, C.; Shah, L.; Joyner, D.; Agarwal, A.; Lee, R.K.; Nath, J. RSNA-ASNR 2019 Brain Hemorrhage CT Annotators, Construction of a machine learning dataset through collaboration: the RSNA 2019 brain CT hemorrhage challenge. Radiol. Artif. Intell., Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). 2020, 2, e190211. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef]
- PyTorch-image-models: the largest collection of PyTorch image encoders / backbones. Including train, eval, inference, export scripts, and pretrained weights—ResNet, ResNeXT, EfficientNet, NFNet, Vision Transformer (ViT), MobileNetV4, MobileNet-V3 & V2, RegNet, DPN, CSPNet, Swin Transformer, MaxViT, CoAtNet, ConvNeXt, and more. GitHub. https://github.com/huggingface/pytorch-image-models. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Huang, G.; Liu, Z.; van der Maaten, L.; Weinberger, K.Q. Densely connected convolutional networks. arXiv. 2016. cs.CV. http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.06993. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Brock, A.; De, S.; Smith, S.L.; Simonyan, K. High-performance large-scale image recognition without normalization. arXiv. 2021. cs.CV. http://arxiv.org/abs/2102.06171. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Tan, M.; Le, Q.V. EfficientNet: rethinking model scaling for convolutional Neural Networks. arXiv [cs.LG]. 2019. http://arxiv.org/abs/1905.11946. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Tan, M.; Le, Q.V. EfficientNetV2: smaller models and faster training. arXiv. 2021. cs.CV. http://arxiv.org/abs/2104.00298. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Howard, A.; Sandler, M.; Chu, G.; Chen, L.C.; Chen, B.; Tan, M.; Wang, W.; Zhu, Y.; Pang, R.; Vasudevan, V.; Le, Q.V.; Adam, H. Searching for MobileNetV3. arXiv. 2019. cs.CV. http://arxiv.org/abs/1905.02244. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- He, K.; Zhang, X.; Ren, S.; Sun, J. Identity mappings in deep residual networks. arXiv. 2016. cs.CV. http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05027. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Xie, S.; Girshick, R.; Dollár, P.; Tu, Z.; He, K. Aggregated residual transformations for deep neural networks. arXiv. 2016. cs.CV. http://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05431. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Liu, Z.; Lin, Y.; Cao, Y.; Hu, H.; Wei, Y.; Zhang, Z.; Lin, S.; Guo, B. Swin Transformer: hierarchical vision Transformer using shifted windows. arXiv. 2021. cs.CV. http://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14030. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Simonyan, K.; Zisserman, A. Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition. arXiv. 2014. cs.CV. http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.1556. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Dosovitskiy, A.; Beyer, L.; Kolesnikov, A.; Weissenborn, D.; Zhai, X.; Unterhiner, T.; Dehghani, M.; Minderer, M.; Heigold, G.; Gelly, S.; Uszkoreit, J.; Houlsby, N. An image is worth 16x16 words: transformers for image recognition at scale. arXiv. 2020. cs.CV. http://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Nishio, M.; Koyasu, S.; Noguchi, S.; Kiguchi, T.; Nakatsu, K.; Akasaka, T.; Yamada, H.; Itoh, K. Automatic detection of acute ischemic stroke using non-contrast computed tomography and two-stage deep learning model. Comput. Methods Programs Biomed., Elsevier BV. 2020, 196, 105711. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]
- He, K.; Zhang, X.; Ren, S.; Sun, J. Identity mappings in deep residual networks. arXiv. 2016. cs.CV. http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05027. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Xie, S.; Girshick, R.; Dollár, P.; Tu, Z.; He, K. Aggregated residual transformations for deep neural networks. arXiv. 2016. cs.CV. http://arxiv.org/abs/1611.05431. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Liu, Z.; Lin, Y.; Cao, Y.; Hu, H.; Wei, Y.; Zhang, Z.; Lin, S.; Guo, B. Swin Transformer: hierarchical vision Transformer using shifted windows. arXiv. 2021. cs.CV. http://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14030. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Simonyan, K.; Zisserman, A. Very deep convolutional networks for large-scale image recognition. arXiv. 2014. cs.CV. http://arxiv.org/abs/1409.1556. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Dosovitskiy, A.; Beyer, L.; Kolesnikov, A.; Weissenborn, D.; Zhai, X.; Unterhiner, T.; Dehghani, M.; Minderer, M.; Heigold, G.; Gelly, S.; Uszkoreit, J.; Houlsby, N. An image is worth 16x16 words: transformers for image recognition at scale. arXiv. 2020. cs.CV. http://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929. (accessed on 26 January 2025).
- Nishio, M.; Koyasu, S.; Noguchi, S.; Kiguchi, T.; Nakatsu, K.; Akasaka, T.; Yamada, H.; Itoh, K. Automatic detection of acute ischemic stroke using non-contrast computed tomography and two-stage deep learning model. Comput. Methods Programs Biomed., Elsevier BV. 2020, 196, 105711. [Google Scholar] [CrossRef] [PubMed]




| Model | Parameter | Date |
|---|---|---|
| densenet201 (12) | 1.81×107 | 25-Aug-16 |
| dm_nfnet_f0 (13) | 6.84×107 | 11-Feb-21 |
| efficientnet_b2 (14) | 7.71×106 | 28-May-19 |
| efficientnetv2_rw_m (15) | 5.11×107 | 01-Apr-21 |
| efficientnetv2_rw_s (15) | 2.22×107 | 01-Apr-21 |
| mobilenetv3_rw (16) | 4.21×106 | 06-May-19 |
| resnetv2_101x1_bitm (17) | 4.25×107 | 16-Mar-16 |
| resnetv2_101x1_bitm_in21k (17) | 4.25×107 | 16-Mar-16 |
| resnext101_32x8d (18) | 8.68×107 | 16-Nov-16 |
| resnext101_64x4d (18) | 8.14×107 | 16-Nov-16 |
| swin_large_patch4_window7_224 (19) | 6.23×106 | 25-May-21 |
| vgg16 (20) | 1.34×108 | 04-Sep-14 |
| vgg16_bn (20) | 1.34×108 | 04-Sep-14 |
| vit_base_patch32_224 (21) | 8.74×107 | 22-Oct-20 |
| vit_large_patch16_224 (21) | 3.03×108 | 20-Oct-20 |
| Model | ROC AUC | Training time (sec) | Predicting time (sec) | Parameter | Sensitivity | Specificity |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| densenet201 | 0.907 | 5.43×104 | 193 | 1.81×107 | 0.828 | 0.871 |
| dm_nfnet_f0 | 0.883 | 4.90×104 | 139 | 6.84×107 | 0.828 | 0.814 |
| efficientnet_b2 | 0.881 | 4.13×104 | 120 | 7.71×106 | 0.859 | 0.814 |
| efficientnetv2_rw_m | 0.883 | 6.80×104 | 194 | 5.11×107 | 0.703 | 0.957 |
| efficientnetv2_rw_s | 0.873 | 4.48×104 | 151 | 2.22×107 | 0.672 | 0.986 |
| mobilenetv3_rw | 0.870 | 5.64×104 | 95 | 4.21×106 | 0.656 | 0.957 |
| resnetv2_101x1_bitm | 0.895 | 4.83×104 | 153 | 4.25×107 | 0.734 | 0.957 |
| resnetv2_101x1_bitm_in21k | 0.884 | 4.82×104 | 154 | 4.25×107 | 0.781 | 0.886 |
| resnext101_32x8d | 0.876 | 8.89×104 | 176 | 8.68×107 | 0.750 | 0.886 |
| resnext101_64x4d | 0.873 | 1.61×105 | 197 | 8.14×107 | 0.734 | 0.843 |
| swin_large_patch4_window7_224 | 0.892 | 1.41×105 | 170 | 6.23×106 | 0.906 | 0.700 |
| vgg16 | 0.870 | 5.10×104 | 103 | 1.34×108 | 0.750 | 0.900 |
| vgg16_bn | 0.862 | 4.72×104 | 104 | 1.34×108 | 0.750 | 0.871 |
| vit_base_patch32_224 | 0.872 | 4.67×104 | 105 | 8.74×107 | 0.750 | 0.871 |
| vit_base_patch16_224 | 0.879 | 1.75×105 | 167 | 3.03×108 | 0.672 | 0.929 |
| Radiology Resident | 0.810 | 0.600 | 1.000 |
Disclaimer/Publisher’s Note: The statements, opinions and data contained in all publications are solely those of the individual author(s) and contributor(s) and not of MDPI and/or the editor(s). MDPI and/or the editor(s) disclaim responsibility for any injury to people or property resulting from any ideas, methods, instructions or products referred to in the content. |
© 2025 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).