An Effective Transformer-based Solution for RSNA Intracranial Hemorrhage Detection Competition

Abstract: We present an effective method for Intracranial Hemorrhage Detection (IHD) which exceeds the performance of the winner solution in RSNA-IHD competition (2019). Meanwhile, our model only takes quarter parameters and ten percent FLOPs compared to the winner's solution. The IHD task needs to predict the hemorrhage category of each slice for the input brain CT. We review the top-5 solutions for the IHD competition held by the Radiological Society of North America(RSNA) in 2019. Nearly all the top solutions rely on 2D convolutional networks and sequential models (Bidirectional GRU or LSTM) to extract intra-slice and inter-slice features, respectively. All the top solutions enhance the performance by leveraging the model ensemble, and the model number varies from 7 to 31. In the past years, since much progress has been made in the computer vision regime especially Transformer-based models, we introduce the Transformer-based techniques to extract the features in both intra-slice and inter-slice views for IHD tasks. Additionally, a semi-supervised method is embedded into our workflow to further improve the performance. The code is available in the manuscript.