Accurate reconstruction of tissue elasticity modulus distribution has always been an important challenge in ultrasound elastography. Considering that existing deep learning-based supervised reconstruction methods only use simulated displacement data with random noise in training, which cannot fully provide the complexity and diversity brought by in-vivo ultrasound data, this study introduces the use of displacement data obtained by tracking in-vivo ultrasound radio frequency signals (i.e., real displacement data) during training, employing a semi-supervised approach to enhance the prediction accuracy of the model. Experimental results indicate that in phantom experiments, the semi-supervised model augmented with real displacement data provides more accurate predictions, with mean absolute errors and mean relative errors both around 3%, while the corresponding data for the fully supervised model are around 5%. When processing real displacement data, the area of prediction error of semi-supervised model was less than that of fully supervised model. The findings of this study confirm the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed approach, providing new insights for the application of deep learning methods in the reconstruction of elastic distribution from in-vivo ultrasound data.
Temporomandibular joint disorder (TMD) is a common oral and maxillofacial disease, which is difficult to detect due to its subtle early symptoms. In this study, a TMD intelligent diagnostic system implemented on edge computing devices was proposed, which can achieve rapid detection of TMD in clinical diagnosis and facilitate its early-stage clinical intervention. The proposed system first automatically segments the important components of the temporomandibular joint, followed by quantitative measurement of the joint gap area, and finally predicts the existence of TMD according to the measurements. In terms of segmentation, this study employs semi-supervised learning to achieve the accurate segmentation of temporomandibular joint, with an average Dice coefficient (DC) of 0.846. A 3D region extraction algorithm for the temporomandibular joint gap area is also developed, based on which an automatic TMD diagnosis model is proposed, with an accuracy of 83.87%. In summary, the intelligent TMD diagnosis system developed in this paper can be deployed at edge computing devices within a local area network, which is able to achieve rapid detecting and intelligent diagnosis of TMD with privacy guarantee.