Background: It is challenging to predict retear after arthroscopic rotator cuff repair (ARCR). The usefulness of arthroscopic intraoperative images as predictors of the ARCR prognosis has not been analyzed.
Purpose: To evaluate the usefulness of arthroscopic images for the prediction of retear after ARCR using deep learning (DL) algorithms.
Study design: Cohort study (Diagnosis); Level of evidence, 2.
Methods: In total, 1394 arthroscopic intraoperative images were retrospectively obtained from 580 patients. Repaired tendon integrity was evaluated using magnetic resonance imaging performed within 2 years after surgery. Images obtained immediately after ARCR were included. We used 3 DL architectures to predict retear based on arthroscopic images. Three pretrained DL algorithms (VGG16, DenseNet, and Xception) were used for transfer learning. Training and test sets were split into 8:2. Threefold stratified validation was used to fine-tune the hyperparameters using the training data set. The validation results of each fold were evaluated. The performance of each model in the test set was evaluated in terms of accuracy, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC), F1-score, sensitivity, and specificity.
Results: In total, 1138 and 256 arthroscopic images were obtained from 514 patients and 66 patients in the nonretear and retear groups, respectively. The mean validation accuracy of each model was 83% for VGG16, 89% for Xception, and 91% for DenseNet. The accuracy for the test set was 76% for VGG16, 87% for Xception, and 91% for DenseNet. The AUC was highest for DenseNet (0.92); it was 0.83 for VGG16 and 0.91 for Xception. For the test set, the specificity and sensitivity were 0.93 and 0.84 for DenseNet, 0.89 and 0.84 for Xception, and 0.70 and 0.80 for VGG16, respectively.
Conclusion: The application of DL algorithms to intraoperative arthroscopic images has demonstrated a high level of accuracy in predicting retear occurrences.
Keywords: arthroscopic imaging; arthroscopic rotator cuff repair; deep learning; prediction; retear.