Ultrasound Detection of Subquadricipital Recess Distension
This work addresses the lack of computer-aided diagnosis tools for joint bleeding in hemophilia patients, offering an incremental improvement in detection accuracy.
The paper tackled the problem of automatically detecting and assessing distension in the subquadricipital recess from knee ultrasound images in hemophilia patients, proposing two approaches: a one-stage object detection method with balanced accuracy of 0.74 and mean IoU of 0.66, and a multi-task approach with balanced accuracy of 0.78 but slightly lower mean IoU.
Joint bleeding is a common condition for people with hemophilia and, if untreated, can result in hemophilic arthropathy. Ultrasound imaging has recently emerged as an effective tool to diagnose joint recess distension caused by joint bleeding. However, no computer-aided diagnosis tool exists to support the practitioner in the diagnosis process. This paper addresses the problem of automatically detecting the recess and assessing whether it is distended in knee ultrasound images collected in patients with hemophilia. After framing the problem, we propose two different approaches: the first one adopts a one-stage object detection algorithm, while the second one is a multi-task approach with a classification and a detection branch. The experimental evaluation, conducted with $483$ annotated images, shows that the solution based on object detection alone has a balanced accuracy score of $0.74$ with a mean IoU value of $0.66$, while the multi-task approach has a higher balanced accuracy value ($0.78$) at the cost of a slightly lower mean IoU value.