Monitoring of the Achilles tendon healing process: can artificial intelligence be helpful?

The aim of this study was to verify improved, ensemble-based strategy for inferencing with use of our solution for quantitative assessment of tendons and ligaments healing process and to show possible applications of the method. We chose the problem of the Achilles tendon rupture as an example representing a group of common sport traumas. We derived our dataset from 90 individuals and divided it into two subsets: healthy individuals and patients with complete Achilles tendon ruptures. We computed approx. 160 000 2D axial cross-sections from 3D MRI studies and preprocessed them to create a suitable input for artificial intelligence methods. Finally, we compared different training methods for chosen approaches for quantitative assessment of tendon tissue healing with the use of statistical analysis. We showed improvement in inferencing with use of the ensemble technique that results from achieving comparable accuracy of 99% for our previously published method trained on 500 000 samples and for the new ensemble technique trained on 160 000 samples. We also showed real-life applications of our approach that address several clinical problems: (1) automatic classification of healthy and injured tendons, (2) assessment of the healing process, (3) a pathologic tissue localization. The presented method enables acquiring comparable accuracy with less training samples. The applications of the method presented in the paper as case studies can facilitate evaluation of the healing process and comparing with previous examination of the same patient as well as with other patients. This approach might be probably transferred to other musculoskeletal tissues and joints.