Muscle volume quantification: guiding transformers with anatomical priors

Abstract: Muscle volume is a useful quantitative biomarker in sports, but also for the follow-up of degenerative musculo-skelletal diseases. In addition to volume, other shape biomarkers can be extracted by segmenting the muscles of interest from medical images. Manual segmentation is still today the gold standard for such measurements despite being very time-consuming. We propose a method for automatic segmentation of 18 muscles of the lower limb on 3D Magnetic Resonance Images to assist such morphometric analysis. By their nature, the tissue of different muscles is undistinguishable when observed in MR Images. Thus, muscle segmentation algorithms cannot rely on appearance but only on contour cues. However, such contours are hard to detect and their thickness varies across subjects. To cope with the above challenges, we propose a segmentation approach based on a hybrid architecture, combining convolutional and visual transformer blocks. We investigate for the first time the behaviour of such hybrid architectures in the context of muscle segmentation for shape analysis. Considering the consistent anatomical muscle configuration, we rely on transformer blocks to capture the longrange relations between the muscles. To further exploit the anatomical priors, a second contribution of this work consists in adding a regularisation loss based on an adjacency matrix of plausible muscle neighbourhoods estimated from the training data. Our experimental results on a unique database of elite athletes show it is possible to train complex hybrid models from a relatively small database of large volumes, while the anatomical prior regularisation favours better predictions.