Ultrasound radiomics: evaluating early nerve injury and its relationship with leprosy reactions in patients with leprosy

Abstract

Objectives: Leprosy is an infectious disease that can be accompanied by disability caused by peripheral neuropathy. The prevalence of grade 2 disability leprosy in 2023 has reached 0.012-55.429 per million people worldwide. Early detection of leprosy is essential to reduce its debilitating sequelae. Radiomics is an emerging field related to the extraction and quantification of information, which may provide new solutions for early detection of leprosy. The present study is the first to combine radiomics and ultrasonography to evaluate nerve damage in the early stages of leprosy in China by September 2024. Methods: Patients were enrolled at the Wenshan Prefecture Institute of Dermatology between October 2018 and December 2022. High-resolution ultrasound imaging of the peripheral nerves was performed. Quantitative ultrasound features were extracted from the follow-up imaging. Radiomic features were selected for a comparative analysis of the disease course using a linear mixed-effects model to control for potential confounding effects. Results: Nine patients with leprosy were enrolled in this study. After treatment, ultrasonography at different nerve sites showed partial improvement in nerve density (mean, skewness), recovery of the fascicular structure (kurtosis), and a decrease in abnormal morphological characteristics in some of the detected sites (P ≤ 0.05). Patients with type 1 leprosy reactions exhibited a lower mean and skewness, higher kurtosis, and increased quantitative morphological characteristics. Conclusion: The study provided the feasibility of ultrasound radiomics to digitally visualize the progression of nerve damage in leprosy patients, and ultrasound radiomics circumvented the adverse influence of different operators with differing levels of experience. The study provided the evidence of ultrasound radiomics as a low-cost method with high-throughput characteristics for clinical use of early nerve injury detection of leprosy.