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Clinically Generalisable End-to-End Graph Learning for CT Image-Based Multitask Stroke Diagnosis

Lu, Z.; Uddin, S.; Uribe, S.; White, S.; Martins, R. T.; Chau, S.; Mosaddek, A. S. M.; Islam, M. S.; Nahar, N.; Azad, A. K. M.; Hossain, K. M. N.; Choudhury, H. S.; Hasan, K. M. R.; Mosaddek, N.; Rahman, S.; Hossain, M. M.; Sizar, K. M. M. H.; Angione, C.; Lio, P.; Islam, M. T.; Moni, M. A.

2026-08-31 radiology and imaging
10.64898/2026.08.26.26360026 medRxiv
Show abstract

Stroke remains a leading cause of mortality and long-term disability worldwide, yet rapid diagnosis is often limited by the shortage of trained radiologists, particularly in resource-constrained settings. Automated analysis of CT imaging offers a potential solution, but existing methods often struggle to achieve clinically generalisable performance while jointly addressing multiple diagnostic tasks. Here we present the Intelligent Integrated Stroke Diagnosis System IISDS, an end-to-end deep learning framework built upon StrokeGNN, a graph-based architecture that integrates 3D contextual feature extraction with U-Net-based 2D lesion segmentation to enable comprehensive stroke analysis from non-contrast CT scans. IISDS performs stroke subtype classification, lesion segmentation and lesion volume estimation within a unified pipeline. To develop and validate the system, we collected and curated BGD-ISD through a collaboration between AI researchers, neurologists, radiologists and clinicians, resulting in a large multi-centre dataset comprising 1,507 CT scans from 597 stroke cases acquired across six hospitals and medical centres in Bangladesh. Across BGD-ISD and multiple publicly available datasets, IISDS achieves state-of-the-art performance on all tasks, improving segmentation accuracy by [≥]0.011 Dice score, reducing lesion volume estimation error by [≥]0.3 average symmetric surface distance (ASSD), and increasing classification performance by [≥]0.018 area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) compared with existing approaches. These results demonstrate the potential of graph-based deep learning to enable clinically generalisable, automated and scalable stroke diagnosis from CT imaging, supporting rapid clinical decision-making, particularly in healthcare environments with limited access to expert radiological interpretation.

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