Deep Learning Approach for MRI in the Classification of Anterior Talofibular Ligament Injuries

Diagnosing anterior talofibular ligament (ATFL) injuries differs among radiologists. Further assessment of ATFL tears is valuable for clinical decision-making.

To establish a deep learning method for classifying ATFL injuries based on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

Retrospective.

One thousand seventy-three patients from a single center with ankle MRI within 1 month of reference standard arthroscopy (in-group dataset), were divided into training, validation, and test sets in a ratio of 8:1:1. Additionally, 167 patients from another center were used as an independent out-group dataset.

Fat-saturation proton density-weighted fast spin-echo sequence at 1.5/3.0 T.

Patients were divided into normal, strain and degeneration, partial tear and complete tear groups (groups 0-3). The complete tear group was divided into five sub-groups by location and the potential avulsion fracture (groups 3.1-3.5). All images were input into AlexNet, VGG11, Small-Sample-Attention Net (SSA-Net), and SSA-Net + Weight Loss for classification. The results were compared with four radiologists with 5-30 years of experience.

Model performance was evaluated by the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, the area under the ROC curve (AUC), and so on. McNemar's test was used to compare performance among the different models, and between the radiologists and models. The intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) was used to assess the reliability of the radiologists. P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant.

The average AUC of AlexNet, VGG11, SAA-Net, and SSA-Net + Weight Loss was 0.95, 0.99, 0.99, 0.99 in groups 0-3 and 0.96, 0.99, 0.99, 0.99 in groups 3.1-3.5. The effect of SSA-Net + Weight Loss was similar to SSA-Net but better than AlexNet and VGG11. In the out-group test set, the AUC of SSA-Net + Weight Loss ranged from 0.89 to 0.99. The ICC of radiologists was 0.97-1.00. The effect of SSA-Net + Weight Loss was better than each radiologist in the in-group and out-group test sets.

Deep learning has potential to be used for classifying ATFL injuries. SSA-Net + Weight Loss has a better diagnostic effect than radiologists with different experience levels.

4 TECHNICAL EFFICACY: Stage 2.