AlignUS: MRI-Guided Ultrasound Representation Learning for ALS Classification from Tongue Images

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease in which early assessment remains challenging, particularly in low-resource settings where MRI is often unavailable. High-resolution ultrasound (HRUS) of the tongue offers a portable and low-cost alternative for evaluating bulbar involvement, but learning reliable diagnostic models is limited by small datasets and the difficulty of extracting robust representations from ultrasound alone. We propose AlignUS, a cross-modal knowledge distillation framework that transfers anatomical knowledge from MRI to a HRUS-based classifier while requiring only HRUS at inference time. The model combines classification loss, supervised contrastive learning, and feature-level distillation to align HRUS representations with MRI embeddings. AlignUS achieves a patient-level balanced accuracy of 0.958, macro-F1 of 0.963, and ROC-AUC of 0.990, aggregated across four patient-level cross-validation folds, with consistent improvements over HRUS baselines and cross-modal alternatives. These results demonstrate that MRI-derived supervision can substantially improve ultrasound-based ALS assessment while preserving low-cost, inference-time independence from MRI.