Abstract
Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) is a common peripheral nerve disease in adults; it can cause pain, numbness, and even muscle atrophy and will adversely affect patients’ daily life and work. There are no standard diagnostic criteria that go against the early diagnosis and treatment of patients. MRI as a novel imaging technique can show the patient’s condition more objectively, and several characteristics of carpal tunnel syndrome have been found. However, various image sequences, heavy artifacts, small lesion characteristics, high volume of imagine reading, and high difficulty in MRI interpretation limit its application in clinical practice. With the development of automatic image segmentation technology, the algorithm has great potential in medical imaging. The challenge is that the segmentation target is too small, and there are two categories of images with the proximal border of the carpal tunnel as the boundary. To meet the challenge, we propose an end-to-end deep learning framework called Deep CTS to segment the carpal tunnel from the MR image. The Deep CTS consists of the shape classifier with a simple convolutional neural network and the carpal tunnel region segmentation with simplified U-Net. With the specialized structure for the carpal tunnel, Deep CTS can segment the carpal tunnel region efficiently and improve the intersection over union of results. The experimental results demonstrated that the performance of the proposed deep learning framework is better than other segmentation networks for small objects. We trained the model with 333 images, tested it with 82 images, and achieved 0.63 accuracy of intersection over union and 0.17 s segmentation efficiency, which indicate great promise for the clinical application of this algorithm.
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The dataset supporting the conclusions of this article is included with the article.
Abbreviations
- CTS:
-
Carpal tunnel syndrome
- EMG:
-
Electromyography
- NCS:
-
Nerve conduction study
- MRI:
-
Magnetic resonance image
- CNN:
-
Convolutional neural networks
- FCN:
-
Fully convolutional networks
- FOV:
-
Field of view
- CLAHE:
-
Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization
- 2D:
-
Two-dimensional
- BN:
-
Batch normalization
- ReLU:
-
Rectified linear unit
- TP:
-
True positive
- TN:
-
True negative
- FP:
-
False positive
- FN:
-
False negative
- PA:
-
Pixel accuracy
- IoU:
-
Intersection over union.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Alibaba Cloud.
Funding
The study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant number 81702135), Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation (grant number LY20H060007, LS21H060001), Zhejiang Traditional Chinese Medicine Research Program (grant number 2017ZB057), and Alibaba Youth Studio Project (the grant number ZJU-032). The funding bodies had no role in the design of the study; in collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; and in drafting the manuscript.
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HL designed the study; HY Z, AA, YZ D, and QJ B performed data collection; QB, XL H, and JY F analyzed the results; and MHAHA, SHAE, VGK, and ZW W drafted the manuscript. The authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki Declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. The study protocols were approved by the Medical Ethics Committee of the First Affiliated Hospital of the College of Medicine, Zhejiang University (ethics approval number: 2021(224)).
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Zhou, H., Bai, Q., Hu, X. et al. Deep CTS: a Deep Neural Network for Identification MRI of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. J Digit Imaging 35, 1433–1444 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-022-00661-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-022-00661-4