Machine-Learning Muscle MRI Analysis to Aid Diagnosis of Muscular Dystrophies

Genetic diagnosis of muscular dystrophies usually is guided by clinical presentation, muscle biopsy, and muscle MRI data. Muscle MRI helps diagnosis based on patterns of fat replacement of muscle. Nevertheless, patterns can overlap between different disorders, and disease-specific patterns can be difficult to identify. The aim of this study was to develop a software-based machine-learning tool that could recognize MRI patterns and help in the diagnosis of muscular dystrophies. Machine learning is a new technology that processes data that exceed the capacity of the human brain to understand readily. This technology can extract and classify patterns, enabling the creation of algorithms that can learn and make predictions.

The authors collected…