AUTHOR=Li Feng , Zhai Penghua , Yang Chao , Feng Gong , Yang Ji , Yuan Yi 

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

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology

VOLUME=Volume 11 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/bioengineering-and-biotechnology/articles/10.3389/fbioe.2023.1268543

DOI=10.3389/fbioe.2023.1268543

ISSN=2296-4185

ABSTRACT=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).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.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).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.