Myofascial Trigger Point Identification in B-Mode Ultrasound: Texture Analysis Versus a Convolutional Neural Network Approach

OBJECTIVE: Myofascial pain syndrome (MPS) is one of the most common causes of chronic pain and affects a large portion of patients seen in specialty pain centers as well as primary care clinics. Diagnosis of MPS relies heavily on a clinician's ability to identify the presence of a myofascial trigger point (MTrP). Ultrasound can help, but requires the user to be experienced in ultrasound. Thus, this study investigates the use of texture features and deep learning strategies for the automatic identification of muscle with MTrPs (i.e., active and latent MTrPs) from normal (i.e., no MTrP) muscle. METHODS: Participants (n = 201) were recruited from Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, and ultrasound videos of their trapezius muscles were acquired. This new data set consists of 1344 images (248 active, 120 latent, 976 normal) collected from these videos. For texture analysis, several features were investigated with varying parameters (i.e., region of interest size, feature type and pixel pair relationships). Convolutional neural networks (CNN) were also applied to observe the performance of deep learning approaches. Performance was evaluated based on the classification accuracy, micro F₁-score, sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value. RESULTS: The best CNN approach was able to differentiate between muscles with and without MTrPs better than the best texture feature approach, with F₁-scores of 0.7299 and 0.7135, respectively. CONCLUSION: The results of this study reveal the challenges associated with MTrP identification and the potential and shortcomings of CNN and radiomics approaches in detail.