Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Detection of ACL Tear Injury in Knee MR Videos

TL;DR

This paper introduces a self-supervised learning method for knee MRI videos that learns anatomical features to improve ACL tear detection, offering explainability and reducing reliance on labeled data.

Contribution

It is the first to apply self-supervised learning with a novel pretext task for ACL injury classification in knee MRI videos, enhancing explainability and performance.

Findings

Learned spatial context invariant features from unlabeled MRI videos.

Achieved reliable and explainable ACL tear classification.

Demonstrated improved performance with the proposed CNN model.

Abstract

The success of deep learning based models for computer vision applications requires large scale human annotated data which are often expensive to generate. Self-supervised learning, a subset of unsupervised learning, handles this problem by learning meaningful features from unlabeled image or video data. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised learning approach to learn transferable features from MR video clips by enforcing the model to learn anatomical features. The pretext task models are designed to predict the correct ordering of the jumbled image patches that the MR video frames are divided into. To the best of our knowledge, none of the supervised learning models performing injury classification task from MR video provide any explanation for the decisions made by the models and hence makes our work the first of its kind on MR video data. Experiments on the pretext task show that this proposed approach enables the model to learn spatial context invariant features which help for reliable and explainable performance in downstream tasks like classification of Anterior Cruciate Ligament tear injury from knee MRI. The efficiency of the novel Convolutional Neural Network proposed in this paper is reflected in the experimental results obtained in the downstream task.