In Pain medicine (Malden, Mass.)
STUDY DESIGN : In vivo retrospective study of fully automatic quantitative imaging feature extraction from clinically acquired lumbar spine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
OBJECTIVE : To demonstrate the feasibility of substituting automatic for human-demarcated segmentation of major anatomical structures in clinical lumbar spine MRI to generate quantitative image-based features and biomechanical models.
SETTING : Previous studies have demonstrated the viability of automatic segmentation applied to medical images; however, the feasibility of these networks to segment clinically acquired images has not yet been demonstrated, as they largely rely on specialized sequences or strict quality of imaging data to achieve good performance.
METHODS : Convolutional neural networks were trained to demarcate vertebral bodies, intervertebral disc, and paraspinous muscles from sagittal and axial T1-weighted MRIs. Intervertebral disc height, muscle cross sectional area, and subject-specific musculoskeletal models of tissue loading in the lumbar spine were then computed from these segmentations and compared against those computed from human-demarcated masks.
RESULTS : Segmentation masks, as well as the morphological metrics and biomechanical models computed from those masks, were highly similar between human- and computer-generated methods. Segmentations were similar with Dice Similarity Coefficients 0.77 or greater across networks, morphological metrics and biomechanical models were similar with Pearson R correlation coefficients 0.69 or greater when significant.
CONCLUSIONS : This study demonstrates the feasibility of substituting computer-generated for human-generated segmentations of major anatomical structures in lumbar spine MRI to compute quantitative image-based morphological metrics and subject-specific musculoskeletal models of tissue loading quickly, efficiently, and at scale without interrupting routine clinical care.
Hess Madeline, Allaire Brett, Gao Kenneth T, Tibrewala Radhika, Inamdar Gaurav, Bharadwaj Upasana, Chin Cynthia, Pedoia Valentina, Bouxsein Mary, Anderson Dennis, Majumdar Sharmila
2022-Oct-31
BACPAC, Biomechanics, Chronic Low Back Pain, Deep learning, Lumbar Spine, MRI, Musculoskeletal, Quantitative Imaging
