Explainable Quality Assessment and Measurement from Real-World Hip Ultrasound Cine Sweeps

This study evaluates Retuve, an open-source explainable pipeline for the automated analysis of infant hip ultrasound cine sweeps. Retuve combines segmentation, Graf-plane calibration, and frame filtering. In a retrospective multicenter study, we tested the full pipeline on an external set of 109 hips from a Canadian community clinic, with internal developmental validation of segmentation on 90 hips and Graf-plane calibration on 419 hips. On the external test set, Retuve achieved 100% specificity and 91% sensitivity for expert agreement regarding whether a sweep contained an analyzable frame, compared with 75% specificity and 96% sensitivity for a radiology fellow; specificity was based on 16 expert-negative examinations. For alpha angle and acetabular coverage, Retuve achieved consistency intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) of 0.77 and 0.74, comparable to the fellow’s 0.70 and 0.74. However, alpha-angle absolute agreement was lower (ICC 0.55, 95% confidence interval (CI) −0.07–0.81), consistent with systematic measurement bias. Internal developmental validation showed Component 1 mask mean average precision at 50% intersection-over-union (mAP50) of 0.753 and box mAP50 of 0.883 and a Component 2 ICC of 0.792. Retuve can select analyzable frames and recover measurements from variable-quality cine sweeps, but alpha-angle calibration requires refinement. Future prospective work should evaluate developmental dysplasia of the hip (DDH) diagnostic accuracy, clinical treatment decision support, and screening outcomes.