Highlighting nerves and blood vessels for ultrasound-guided axillary nerve block procedures using neural networks

Erik Smistad; Kaj Fredrik Johansen; Daniel Høyer Iversen; Ingerid Reinertsen

doi:10.1117/1.JMI.5.4.044004

10 November 2018 Highlighting nerves and blood vessels for ultrasound-guided axillary nerve block procedures using neural networks

Erik Smistad, Kaj Fredrik Johansen, Daniel Høyer Iversen, Ingerid Reinertsen

Author Affiliations +

Journal of Medical Imaging, Vol. 5, Issue 4, 044004 (November 2018). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JMI.5.4.044004

Abstract

Ultrasound images acquired during axillary nerve block procedures can be difficult to interpret. Highlighting the important structures, such as nerves and blood vessels, may be useful for the training of inexperienced users. A deep convolutional neural network is used to identify the musculocutaneous, median, ulnar, and radial nerves, as well as the blood vessels in ultrasound images. A dataset of 49 subjects is collected and used for training and evaluation of the neural network. Several image augmentations, such as rotation, elastic deformation, shadows, and horizontal flipping, are tested. The neural network is evaluated using cross validation. The results showed that the blood vessels were the easiest to detect with a precision and recall above 0.8. Among the nerves, the median and ulnar nerves were the easiest to detect with an F-score of 0.73 and 0.62, respectively. The radial nerve was the hardest to detect with an F-score of 0.39. Image augmentations proved effective, increasing F-score by as much as 0.13. A Wilcoxon signed-rank test showed that the improvement from rotation, shadow, and elastic deformation augmentations were significant and the combination of all augmentations gave the best result. The results are promising; however, there is more work to be done, as the precision and recall are still too low. A larger dataset is most likely needed to improve accuracy, in combination with anatomical and temporal models.

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Erik Smistad, Kaj Fredrik Johansen, Daniel Høyer Iversen, and Ingerid Reinertsen "Highlighting nerves and blood vessels for ultrasound-guided axillary nerve block procedures using neural networks," Journal of Medical Imaging 5(4), 044004 (10 November 2018). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.JMI.5.4.044004

Received: 6 June 2018; Accepted: 23 October 2018; Published: 10 November 2018

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