DeepACSA: Automatic Segmentation of Cross-Sectional Area in Ultrasound Images of Lower Limb Muscles Using Deep Learning.

Purpose: Muscle anatomical cross-sectional area (ACSA) can be assessed using ultrasound and images are usually evaluated manually. Here, we present DeepACSA, a deep learning approach to automatically segment ACSA in panoramic ultrasound images of the human rectus femoris (RF), vastus lateralis (VL), gastrocnemius medialis (GM) and lateralis (GL) muscles.
Methods: We trained three muscle-specific convolutional neural networks (CNN) using 1772 ultrasound images from 153 participants (age = 38.2 yr, range = 13-78). Images were acquired in 10% increments from 30% to 70% of femur length for RF and VL and at 30% and 50% of muscle length for GM and GL. During training, CNN performance was evaluated using intersection-over-union scores. We compared the performance of DeepACSA to manual analysis and a semiautomated algorithm using an unseen test set.
Results: Comparing DeepACSA analysis of the RF to manual analysis with erroneous predictions removed (3.3%) resulted in intraclass correlation (ICC) of 0.989 (95% confidence interval = 0.983-0.992), mean difference of 0.20 cm 2 (0.10-0.30), and SEM of 0.33 cm 2 (0.26-0.41). For the VL, ICC was 0.97 (0.96-0.968), mean difference was 0.85 cm 2 (-0.4 to 1.31), and SEM was 0.92 cm 2 (0.73-1.09) after removal of erroneous predictions (7.7%). After removal of erroneous predictions (12.3%), GM/GL muscles demonstrated an ICC of 0.98 (0.96-0.99), a mean difference of 0.43 cm 2 (0.21-0.65), and an SEM of 0.41 cm 2 (0.29-0.51). Analysis duration was 4.0 ± 0.43 s (mean ± SD) for analysis of one image in our test set using DeepACSA.
Conclusions: DeepACSA provides fast and objective segmentation of lower limb panoramic ultrasound images comparable with manual segmentation. Inaccurate model predictions occurred predominantly on low-quality images, highlighting the importance of high-quality image for accurate prediction.
(Copyright © 2022 by the American College of Sports Medicine.)