Automatic Classification of Neuromuscular Diseases in Children Using Photoacoustic Imaging

Neuromuscular diseases (NMDs) cause a significant burden for both healthcare systems and society. They can lead to severe progressive muscle weakness, muscle degeneration, contracture, deformity and progressive disability. The NMDs evaluated in this study often manifest in early childhood. As subtypes of disease, e.g. Duchenne Muscular Dystropy (DMD) and Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), are difficult to differentiate at the beginning and worsen quickly, fast and reliable differential diagnosis is crucial. Photoacoustic and ultrasound imaging has shown great potential to visualize and quantify the extent of different diseases. The addition of automatic classification of such image data could further improve standard diagnostic procedures. We compare deep learning-based 2-class and 3-class classifiers based on VGG16 for differentiating healthy from diseased muscular tissue. This work shows promising results with high accuracies above 0.86 for the 3-class problem and can be used as a proof of concept for future approaches for earlier diagnosis and therapeutic monitoring of NMDs.