Prediction of MRI Hardware Failures based on Image Features using Time Series Classification

Already before systems malfunction one has to know if hardware components will fail in near future in order to counteract in time. Thus, unplanned downtime is ought to be avoided. In medical imaging, maximizing the system's uptime is crucial for patients' health and healthcare provider's daily business. We aim to predict failures of Head/Neck coils used in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) by training a statistical model on sequential data collected over time. As image features depend on the coil's condition, their deviations from the normal range already hint to future failure. Thus, we used image features and their variation over time to predict coil damage. After comparison of different time series classification methods we found Long Short Term Memorys (LSTMs) to achieve the highest F-score of 86.43% and to tell with 98.33% accuracy if hardware should be replaced.

Prediction of MRI Hardware Failures based on Image Features using Ensemble Learning

In order to ensure trouble-free operation, prediction of hardware failures is essential. This applies especially to medical systems. Our goal is to determine hardware which needs to be exchanged before failing. In this work, we focus on predicting failures of 20-channel Head/Neck coils using image-related measurements. Thus, we aim to solve a classification problem with two classes, normal and broken coil. To solve this problem, we use data of two different levels. One level refers to one-dimensional features per individual coil channel on which we found a fully connected neural network to perform best. The other data level uses matrices which represent the overall coil condition and feeds a different neural network. We stack the predictions of those two networks and train a Random Forest classifier as the ensemble learner. Thus, combining insights of both trained models improves the prediction results and allows us to determine the coil's condition with an F-score of 94.14% and an accuracy of 99.09%.