Development of an automatic muscle atrophy measuring algorithm to calculate the ratio of supraspinatus in supraspinous fossa using deep learning

Abstract

Background and objective: Rotator cuff muscle tear is one of the most frequent reason of operations in orthopedic surgery. There are several clinical indicators such as Goutallier grade and occupation ratio in the diagnosis and surgery of these diseases, but subjective intervention of the diagnosis is an obstacle in accurately detecting the correct region.

Methods: Therefore, in this paper, we propose a fully convolutional deep learning algorithm to quantitatively detect the fossa and muscle region by measuring the occupation ratio of supraspinatus in the supraspinous fossa. In the development and performance evaluation of the algorithm, 240 patients MRI dataset with various disease severities were included.

Results: As a result, the pixel-wise accuracy of the developed algorithm is 0.9984 +/- 0.073 in the fossa region and 0.9988 +/- 0.065 in the muscle region. The dice coefficient is 0.9718 +/- 0.012 in the fossa region and 0.9463 +/- 0.047 in the muscle region.

Conclusions: We expect that the proposed convolutional neural network can improve the efficiency and objectiveness of diagnosis by quantifying the index used in the orthopedic rotator cuff tear.