Editor — The advent of ultrasound-guided regional anaesthesia (UGRA) has revolutionised the practice of regional anaesthesia including peripheral nerve blocks. Compared with traditional surface landmark techniques that anaesthesiologists use to gauge the location of nerves, UGRA offers continuous visualisation of the nerves and surrounding sonoanatomy. 1 This live visualisation allows for a more precise spread of the injectate around a nerve, faster sensory onset, and an overall increase in blocking success rate. 2 As a result of the rapid adoption of this imaging technology, identification (segmentation) of anatomical structures in ultrasound images has become a significant research area, particularly in relation to the development of machine learning models for tasks related to diagnostics or anaesthetic procedures. 3 In this study, we aimed to determine a clinically relevant threshold for image segmentation by assessing intra-labeller and inter-labeller variability in anaesthetists when segmenting ultrasound images.
January 2024 — See James Bowness et al.'s review of our paper here.