中国物理B ›› 2019, Vol. 28 ›› Issue (3): 38701-038701.doi: 10.1088/1674-1056/28/3/038701

• INTERDISCIPLINARY PHYSICS AND RELATED AREAS OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY • 上一篇    下一篇

Enhancing convolutional neural network scheme forrheumatoid arthritis grading with limited clinical data

Jian Tang(汤键), Zhibin Jin(金志斌), Xue Zhou(周雪), Weijing Zhang(张玮婧), Min Wu(吴敏), Qinghong Shen(沈庆宏), Qian Cheng(程茜), Xueding Wang(王学鼎), Jie Yuan(袁杰)   

  1. 1 School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China;
    2 Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, Nanjing 210023, China;
    3 Institution of Acoustics, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
  • 收稿日期:2018-10-18 修回日期:2018-12-19 出版日期:2019-03-05 发布日期:2019-03-05
  • 通讯作者: Jie Yuan E-mail:yuanjie@nju.edu.cn
  • 基金资助:

    Project supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFC0111402) and the Natural Science Funds of Jiangsu Province of China (Grant No. BK20181256).

Enhancing convolutional neural network scheme forrheumatoid arthritis grading with limited clinical data

Jian Tang(汤键)1, Zhibin Jin(金志斌)2, Xue Zhou(周雪)1, Weijing Zhang(张玮婧)2, Min Wu(吴敏)2, Qinghong Shen(沈庆宏)1, Qian Cheng(程茜)3, Xueding Wang(王学鼎)3, Jie Yuan(袁杰)1,2,3   

  1. 1 School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China;
    2 Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital, Nanjing 210023, China;
    3 Institution of Acoustics, Tongji University, Shanghai 200092, China
  • Received:2018-10-18 Revised:2018-12-19 Online:2019-03-05 Published:2019-03-05
  • Contact: Jie Yuan E-mail:yuanjie@nju.edu.cn
  • Supported by:

    Project supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2017YFC0111402) and the Natural Science Funds of Jiangsu Province of China (Grant No. BK20181256).

摘要:

The gray-scale ultrasound (US) imaging method is usually used to assess synovitis in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in clinical practice. This four-grade scoring system depends highly on the sonographer's experience and has relatively lower validity compared with quantitative indexes. However, the training of a qualified sonographer is expensive and time-consuming while few studies focused on automatic RA grading methods. The purpose of this study is to propose an automatic RA grading method using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) to assist clinical assessment. Gray-scale ultrasound images of finger joints are taken as inputs while the output is the corresponding RA grading results. Firstly, we performed the auto-localization of synovium in the RA image and obtained a high precision in localization. In order to make up for the lack of a large annotated training dataset, we performed data augmentation to increase the number of training samples. Motivated by the approach of transfer learning, we pre-trained the GoogLeNet on ImageNet as a feature extractor and then fine-tuned it on our own dataset. The detection results showed an average precision exceeding 90%. In the experiment of grading RA severity, the four-grade classification accuracy exceeded 90% while the binary classification accuracies exceeded 95%. The results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves performances comparable to RA experts in multi-class classification. The promising results of our proposed DCNN-based RA grading method can have the ability to provide an objective and accurate reference to assist RA diagnosis and the training of sonographers.

关键词: rheumatoid arthritis, convolutional neural network, medical ultrasound images

Abstract:

The gray-scale ultrasound (US) imaging method is usually used to assess synovitis in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in clinical practice. This four-grade scoring system depends highly on the sonographer's experience and has relatively lower validity compared with quantitative indexes. However, the training of a qualified sonographer is expensive and time-consuming while few studies focused on automatic RA grading methods. The purpose of this study is to propose an automatic RA grading method using deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN) to assist clinical assessment. Gray-scale ultrasound images of finger joints are taken as inputs while the output is the corresponding RA grading results. Firstly, we performed the auto-localization of synovium in the RA image and obtained a high precision in localization. In order to make up for the lack of a large annotated training dataset, we performed data augmentation to increase the number of training samples. Motivated by the approach of transfer learning, we pre-trained the GoogLeNet on ImageNet as a feature extractor and then fine-tuned it on our own dataset. The detection results showed an average precision exceeding 90%. In the experiment of grading RA severity, the four-grade classification accuracy exceeded 90% while the binary classification accuracies exceeded 95%. The results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves performances comparable to RA experts in multi-class classification. The promising results of our proposed DCNN-based RA grading method can have the ability to provide an objective and accurate reference to assist RA diagnosis and the training of sonographers.

Key words: rheumatoid arthritis, convolutional neural network, medical ultrasound images

中图分类号:  (Medical imaging)

  • 87.57.-s
07.05.Mh (Neural networks, fuzzy logic, artificial intelligence) 43.35.Wa (Biological effects of ultrasound, ultrasonic tomography)