The Role of Pleura and Adipose in Lung Ultrasound AI

Gautam Rajendrakumar Gare, Wanwen Chen, Alex Ling Yu Hung, Edward Chen, Hai V. Tran, Tom Fox, Peter Lowery, Kevin Zamora, Bennett P. deBoisblanc, Ricardo Luis Rodriguez, John Michael Galeotti

Abstract: In this paper, we study the significance of the pleura and adipose tissue in lung ultrasound AI analysis. We highlight their more prominent appearance when using high-frequency linear (HFL) instead of curvilinear ultrasound probes, showing HFL reveals better pleura detail. We compare the diagnostic utility of the pleura and adipose tissue using an HFL ultrasound probe. Masking the adipose tissue during training and inference (while retaining the pleural line and Merlin's space artifacts such as A-lines and B-lines) improved the AI model's diagnostic accuracy.