Semi-supervised Ensemble Learning for Automatic Interpretation of Lung Ultrasound Videos.

Abstract

Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) stands as a safe, portable, and cost-effective imaging modality for swift bedside patient examinations. Specifically, lung ultrasonography (LUS) has proven useful in evaluating both acute and chronic pulmonary conditions. Despite its clinical value, automatic LUS interpretation remains relatively unexplored, particularly in multi-label contexts. This work proposes a novel deep learning (DL) framework tailored for interpreting lung POCUS videos, whose outputs are the finding(s) present in these videos (such as A-lines, B-lines, or consolidations). The pipeline, based on a residual (2+1)D architecture, initiates with a pre-processing routine for video masking and standardisation, and employs a semi-supervised approach to harness available unlabeled data. Additionally, we introduce an ensemble modeling strategy that aggregates outputs from models trained to predict distinct label sets, thereby leveraging the hierarchical nature of LUS findings. The proposed framework and its building blocks were evaluated through extensive experiments with both multi-class and multi-label models, highlighting its versatility. In a held-out test set, the categorical proposal, suited for expedite triage, achieved an average F1-score of 92.4%, while the multi-label proposal, helpful for patient management and referral, achieved an average F1-score of 70.5% across five relevant LUS findings. Overall, the semi-supervised methodology contributed significantly to improved performance, while the proposed hierarchy-aware ensemble provided moderate additional gains.