Multi-view parallel vertebra segmentation and identification on computed tomography (CT) images

Abstract

Vertebra segmentation and identification is the crucial step for automatic spine analysis. Manual or semi-automatic segmentation and identification is a cumbersome approach used conventionally. This paper proposes an automatic method for accurate pixel-level labeling of vertebrae on CT images. The algorithm consists of two main steps: in the first step, a pixel-link convolutional neural network is trained to generate a binary mask for the vertebral column; and in the second step, a multi-label dilated residual network identifies the labels for each vertebra. The proposed model is evaluated on the VerSe-dataset which contains 374 CT scans. This includes scans with a variety of field-of-views and healthy/disease cases acquired from multiple scanners. The model is trained and evaluated on 2D coronal and sagittal slices extracted from the CT volume. Average dice scores of 0.89 and 0.90 were achieved on two test sets released as public and hidden test sets for VerSe-dataset. The mean pixel accuracy of the predicted segmentation maps for vertebra regions are 0.72–0.86 and 0.68–0.85 for test set 1 and test 2, respectively.

Keywords

• Vertebra segmentation
• Vertebra identification
• CNN
• VerSe dataset
• DRN