Automatic knee meniscus tear detection and orientation classification with Mask-RCNN

Abstract

Purpose: This work presents our contribution to a data challenge organized by the French Radiology Society during the Journées Francophones de Radiologie in October 2018. This challenge consisted in classifying MR images of the knee with respect to the presence of tears in the knee menisci, on meniscal tear location, and meniscal tear orientation.

Materials and methods: We trained a mask region-based convolutional neural network (R-CNN) to explicitly localize normal and torn menisci, made it more robust with ensemble aggregation, and cascaded it into a shallow ConvNet to classify the orientation of the tear.

Results: Our approach predicted accurately tears in the database provided for the challenge. This strategy yielded a weighted AUC score of 0.906 for all three tasks, ranking first in this challenge.

Conclusion: The extension of the database or the use of 3D data could contribute to further improve the performances especially for non-typical cases of extensively damaged menisci or multiple tears.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Knee meniscus; Mask region-based convolutional neural network (R-CNN); Meniscal tear detection; Orientation classification.