Automated diagnosis of anterior cruciate ligament via a weighted multi-view network

• Published in: Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology 2023-10, Vol.11, p.1268543-1268543
• Main Authors: Li, Feng, Zhai, Penghua, Yang, Chao, Feng, Gong, Yang, Ji, Yuan, Yi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: ACL diagnosis; Bioengineering and Biotechnology; computer-aided diagnosis; deep learning; magnetic resonance imaging; multi-view learning
• ISSN: 2296-4185; 2296-4185
• DOI: 10.3389/fbioe.2023.1268543

Objective: To build a three-dimensional (3D) deep learning-based computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system and investigate its applicability for automatic detection of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) of the knee joint in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Methods: In this study, we develop a 3D weighted multi-view convolutional neural network by fusing different views of MRI to detect ACL. The network is evaluated on two MRI datasets, the in-house MRI-ACL dataset and the publicly available MRNet-v1.0 dataset. In the MRI-ACL dataset, the retrospective study collects 100 cases, and four views per patient are included. There are 50 ACL patients and 50 normal patients, respectively. The MRNet-v1.0 dataset contains 1,250 cases with three views, of which 208 are ACL patients, and the rest are normal or other abnormal patients. Results: The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of the ACL diagnosis system is 97.00% and 92.86% at the optimal threshold for the MRI-ACL dataset and the MRNet-v1.0 dataset, respectively, indicating a high overall diagnostic accuracy. In comparison, the best AUC of the single-view diagnosis methods are 96.00% (MRI-ACL dataset) and 91.78% (MRNet-v1.0 dataset), and our method improves by about 1.00% and 1.08%. Furthermore, our method also improves by about 1.00% (MRI-ACL dataset) and 0.28% (MRNet-v1.0 dataset) compared with the multi-view network (i.e., MRNet). Conclusion: The presented 3D weighted multi-view network achieves superior AUC in diagnosing ACL, not only in the in-house MRI-ACL dataset but also in the publicly available MRNet-v1.0 dataset, which demonstrates its clinical applicability for the automatic detection of ACL.