Surgically Oriented Ultrasound-Based AI of Median Nerve Morphology as a Decision Support for Carpal Tunnel Release: A Calibrated ConvNeXt-CBAM Framework With Supervised Contrastive Warm-Up

A calibrated, explainable ConvNeXt-CBAM ultrasound classifier delivers reliable probabilities and anatomically faithful saliency that are directly actionable for surgical triage, timing of decompression, and preoperative counseling in CTS. These findings support ultrasound-based AI as a practical adjunct to clinical assessment and nerve conduction studies in hand surgery, warranting prospective, multicenter validation and workflow integration.