Automatic Tracking of Muscle Cross-Sectional Area Using Convolutional Neural Networks with Ultrasound

Objectives The purpose of this study was to develop an automatic tracking method for the muscle cross-sectional area (CSA) on ultrasound (US) images using a convolutional neural network (CNN). The performance of the proposed method was evaluated and compared with that of the state-of-the art muscle segmentation method. Methods A real-time US image sequence was obtained from the rectus femoris muscle during voluntary contraction. A CNN was built to segment the rectus femoris muscle and calculate the CSA in each US frame. This network consisted of 2 stages: feature extraction and score map reconstruction. The training of the network was divided into 3 steps with output score map resolutions of one-fourth, one-half, and all of the original image. We evaluated the segmentation performance of our method with 5-fold cross-validation. The mean precision, recall, and dice similarity score were calculated. Results The mean precision, recall, and Dice's coefficient (DSC) +/- SD were 0.936 +/- 0.029, 0.882 +/- 0.045, and 0.907 +/- 0.023, respectively. Compared with the state-of-the-art muscle segmentation method (constrained mutual-information-based free-form deformation), the proposed method using CNN showed high performance. Conclusions The automated method proposed in this study provides an accurate and efficient approach to the estimation of the muscle CSA during muscle contraction.