# InterSliceBoost: Identifying Tissue Layers in Three-dimensional Ultrasound Images for Chronic Lower Back Pain (cLBP) Assessment

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.19735 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19735/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 48 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Image-to-Image Translation with Conditional Adversarial Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07004/) (2016)
- [Super SloMo: High Quality Estimation of Multiple Intermediate Frames for Video Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.00080/) (2017)
- [GAN-based Synthetic Medical Image Augmentation for increased CNN Performance in Liver Lesion Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01229/) (2018)
- [Model Evaluation, Model Selection, and Algorithm Selection in Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12808/) (2018)
- [Pros and Cons of GAN Evaluation Measures: New Developments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09396/) (2021)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Image Augmentation Techniques for Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01491/) (2022)
- [Learning from Few Examples: A Summary of Approaches to Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04291/) (2022)
- [Enhancing MR Image Segmentation with Realistic Adversarial Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03429/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Available studies on chronic lower back pain (cLBP) typically focus on one or a few specific tissues rather than conducting a comprehensive layer-by-layer analysis. Since three-dimensional (3-D) images often contain hundreds of slices, manual annotation of these anatomical structures is both time-consuming and error-prone. We aim to develop and validate a novel approach called InterSliceBoost to enable the training of a segmentation model on a partially annotated dataset without compromising segmentation performance. The architecture of InterSliceBoost includes two components: an inter-slice generator and a segmentation model. The generator utilizes residual block-based encoders to extract features from adjacent image-mask pairs (IMPs). Differential features are calculated and input into a decoder to generate inter-slice IMPs. The segmentation model is trained on partially annotated datasets (e.g., skipping 1, 2, 3, or 7 images) and the generated inter-slice IMPs. To validate the performance of InterSliceBoost, we utilized a dataset of 76 B-mode ultrasound scans acquired on 29 subjects enrolled in an ongoing cLBP study. InterSliceBoost, trained on only 33% of the image slices, achieved a mean Dice coefficient of 80.84% across all six layers on the independent test set, with Dice coefficients of 73.48%, 61.11%, 81.87%, 95.74%, 83.52% and 88.74% for segmenting dermis, superficial fat, superficial fascial membrane, deep fat, deep fascial membrane, and muscle. This performance is significantly higher than the conventional model trained on fully annotated images (p<0.05). InterSliceBoost can effectively segment the six tissue layers depicted on 3-D B-model ultrasound images in settings with partial annotations.