BENGALURU: Research shows that Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool can now help in analysing the most common nerve-related disorder, Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (CTS) in ultrasound videos.
This can specifically be beneficial for individuals suffering from CTS who perform repetitive hand movements such as office staff who work with keyboards, assembly line workers, and sportspersons.
The tool was developed in collaboration with researchers at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) and doctors at Aster-CMI Hospital.
CTS arises when the median nerve, which runs from the forearm into the hand, is compressed at the carpal tunnel part of the wrist, resulting in numbness, tingling or pain. Doctors currently use ultrasound to visualise the median nerve and assess its size, shape, and any potential abnormalities.
“But unlike X-rays and MRI scans, it is hard to detect what is going on in ultrasound images and videos,” said Karan R Gujarati, first author and former MTech student at the Department of Computational and Data Sciences (CDS), IISc. “At the wrist, the nerve is quite visible, its boundaries are clear, but if you go down to the elbow region, there are many other structures, and the boundaries of the nerve are not clear,” he added.
To develop this tool, the team turned to a machine learning model based on transformer architecture, similar to the one powering ChatGPT. The model was originally developed to detect objects simultaneously in YouTube videos. The team stripped the model’s computationally expensive elements to speed it up and cut down the number of objects to just one – the median nerve.
They collaborated with Lokesh Bathala, Lead Consultant Neurologist, at Aster-CMI Hospital, to collect and annotate ultrasound videos from both healthy participants and people with CTS, to train the model. Once trained, the model was able to segment the median nerve in individual frames of the ultrasound video.
The model is already deployed at the hospital on a pilot basis. “Initially, we trained the model on one nerve. Now we are going to extend it to all nerves in the upper and lower limbs. We have an ultrasound machine connected to an additional monitor where the model is running. I can look at the nerve, and at the same time, the software tool is also delineating the nerve. We can see its performance in real-time,” added Bathala.