Deep learning for synovial volume segmentation of the first carpometacarpal joint in osteoarthritis patients

The objective of this study was to develop a deep-learning-based approach to automatically segment 3D ultrasound images of the synovial tissue in osteoarthritis of the first carpometacarpal (CMC1 OA).

Deep learning predictions on 2D ultrasound slices sampled in the transverse plane were used to view the synovial tissue of the first carpometacarpal in patients with OA, followed by reconstruction into 3D surfaces. A modified 2D U-Net was trained using a dataset of 832 2D US images resliced from 89 3D US images. Segmentation accuracy was evaluated using a testing dataset of 208 2D US images resliced from 15 3D US images. Absolute and signed performance metrics were computed, and segmentation performance was compared between the manual segmentations of raters 1 and 2.

Results of the U-Net-based run were mean 3D DSC 86.9 ± 4.8%, recall 93.7 ± 3.6%, precision 81.1 ± 6.9%, volume percent difference 16.9 ± 10.2%, mean surface distance 0.18 ± 0.04 mm, and Hausdorff distance 1.8 ± 0.8 mm. The algorithm demonstrated an overall increase in performance after 3D segmentation reconstruction compared to 2D predictions, but the difference was not statistically significant.

This study investigated the use of a modified U-Net algorithm to automatically segment the synovial tissue volume (STV) of CMC1 OA patients and demonstrated that the addition of this deep learning method increases the efficiency of STV estimations in clinical trial settings.