SE-ATT-YOLO- A deep learning driven ultrasound based respiratory motion compensation system for precision...

The therapeutic management of neoplasm employs high level energy beam to ablate malignant cells, which can cause collateral damage to adjacent normal tissue. Furthermore, respiration-induced organ motion, during radiotherapy can lead to significant displacement of neoplasms. In this work, a non-invasive ultrasound-based deep learning algorithm for respiratory motion compensation system (RMCS) was developed to mitigate the effect of respiratory motion induced neoplasm movement in radiotherapy.

The deep learning algorithm generated based on modified YOLOv8n (You Only Look Once), by incorporating squeeze and excitation blocks for channel wise recalibration and enhanced attention mechanisms for spatial channel focus (SE-ATT-YOLO) to cope up with enhanced ultrasound image detection in real time scenario. The trained model was inferred with ultrasound movement of human diaphragm and tracked the bounding box coordinates using BoT-Sort, which drives the RMCS.

The SE-ATT-YOLO model achieved mean average precision (mAP) of 0.88 which outperforms YOLOv8n with the value of 0.85. The root mean square error (RMSE) obtained from prerecorded respiratory signals with the compensated RMCS signal was calculated. The model achieved an inference speed of approximately 50 FPS. The RMSE values recorded were 4.342 for baseline shift, 3.105 for sinusoidal signal, 1.778 for deep breath, and 1.667 for slow signal.

The SE-ATT-YOLO model outperformed all the results of previous models. The loss function uncertainty in YOLOv8n model was rectified in SE-ATT YOLO depicting the stability of the model. The model' stability, speed and accuracy of the model optimized the performance of the RMCS.