A deep learning approach to median nerve evaluation in ultrasound images of carpal tunnel inlet.
Med Biol Eng Comput
; 60(11): 3255-3264, 2022 Nov.
Article
en En
| MEDLINE
| ID: mdl-36152237
Ultrasound (US) imaging is recognized as a useful support for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) assessment through the evaluation of median nerve morphology. However, US is still far to be systematically adopted to evaluate this common entrapment neuropathy, due to US intrinsic challenges, such as its operator dependency and the lack of standard protocols. To support sonographers, the present study proposes a fully-automatic deep learning approach to median nerve segmentation from US images. We collected and annotated a dataset of 246 images acquired in clinical practice involving 103 rheumatic patients, regardless of anatomical variants (bifid nerve, closed vessels). We developed a Mask R-CNN with two additional transposed layers at segmentation head to accurately segment the median nerve directly on transverse US images. We calculated the cross-sectional area (CSA) of the predicted median nerve. Proposed model achieved good performances both in median nerve detection and segmentation: Precision (Prec), Recall (Rec), Mean Average Precision (mAP) and Dice Similarity Coefficient (DSC) values are 0.916 ± 0.245, 0.938 ± 0.233, 0.936 ± 0.235 and 0.868 ± 0.201, respectively. The CSA values measured on true positive predictions were comparable with the sonographer manual measurements with a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.918 mm2. Experimental results showed the potential of proposed model, which identified and segmented the median nerve section in normal anatomy images, while still struggling when dealing with infrequent anatomical variants. Future research will expand the dataset including a wider spectrum of normal anatomy and pathology to support sonographers in daily practice.
Palabras clave
Texto completo:
1
Colección:
01-internacional
Base de datos:
MEDLINE
Asunto principal:
Síndrome del Túnel Carpiano
/
Aprendizaje Profundo
Tipo de estudio:
Diagnostic_studies
/
Guideline
/
Prognostic_studies
Límite:
Humans
Idioma:
En
Revista:
Med Biol Eng Comput
Año:
2022
Tipo del documento:
Article
País de afiliación:
Italia