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Original Article
Special Issue on AI & Robotics

Whole Spine Segmentation Using Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation

Neurospine 2024;21(1):57-67.
Published online: February 1, 2024

1Machine Intelligence in Clinical Neuroscience (MICN) Laboratory, Department of Neurosurgery, Clinical Neuroscience Center, University Hospital Zürich, University of Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

2Department of Neurosurgery, Daejeon Eulji University Hospital, Eulji University Medical School, Daejeon, Korea

Corresponding Author Victor E. Staartjes Machine Intelligence in Clinical Neuroscience (MICN) Laboratory, Department of Neurosurgery, Clinical Neuroscience Center, University Hospital Zürich, University of Zürich, Sternwartstrasse 6, Zürich 8091, Switzerland Email: victoregon.staartjes@usz.ch
• Received: November 1, 2023   • Revised: January 6, 2024   • Accepted: January 7, 2024

Copyright © 2024 by the Korean Spinal Neurosurgery Society

This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Whole Spine Segmentation Using Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation
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Whole Spine Segmentation Using Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation
Image Image Image Image
Fig. 1. An exemplary illustration of our pipeline is shown. CT slice as input is used for object detection, then cropped and a 2DU-net for segmentation is trained and evaluated. (A) Input image with manual segmentations. (B) Object detections on CT before cropping. (C) Cropped input image for U-Net. (D) Cropped input mask for U-Net. (E) Thresholded prediction of U-Net. (F) Probability map generated from U-Net. (G) Cropped Segmentation to compare U-Net performance. (H) The cropped predictions are reassembled into a full segmentation. 2D, 2-dimensional.
Fig. 2. Precision versus confidence plots of the YOLOv8m network, the blue line depicting performance across all classes: (A) training performance on VerSe 20, (C) holdout on VerSe 20, (E) MSD T10, (G) COVID-19. Recall versus confidence curves, the blue line depicting performance across all classes: (B) training performance on VerSe 20, (D) holdout on VerSe 20, (F) MSD T10, (H) COVID-19.
Fig. 3. Boxplots across all 4 evaluation sets: (A) Dice score, (B) Jaccard scroe, (C) 95th percentile Hausdorff distance.
Fig. 4. Exemplary results from external validation set. (A) CT scan from VerSe 20 holdout set. (B) A with overlay of predicted mask; red signifies high probability, blue low. (C) Ground truth to A. (D) CT scan from the MSD 10 dataset. (E) D with predictions overlay. (F) Ground truth to D. (G) CT from the COVID-19 set. (H) G with prediction overlay; red signifies high probability, blue low. (I) Ground truth to G.
Whole Spine Segmentation Using Object Detection and Semantic Segmentation
Variable Dataset
VerSe MSD T10 COVID-19
CT region Spine Liver Chest
Baseline
 No. of patients 214 20 20
 Age (yr) 59.00 ± 17.00 NA NA
Voxel dimensions
 Pixel spacing (mm) 0.34 ± 0.16 0.95 ± 0.11 1± 0
 Slice thickness (mm) 1.24 ± 0.06 1.04 ± 0.11 1± 0
Segment Instances
Precision
Recall
mAP50
mAP50-95
Val Hold Ext1 Ext2 Val Hold Ext1 Ext2 Val Hold Ext1 Ext2 Val Hold Ext1 Ext2 Val Hold Ext1 Ext2
All 16,634 16,351 10,862 13,482 0.899 0.906 0.780 0.235 0.780 0.775 0.347 0.155 0.849 0.845 0.405 0.130 0.638 0.632 0.145 0.038
C1 224 243 0 0 0.955 0.936 - - 0.897 0.827 - - 0.932 0.889 - - 0.748 0.691 - -
C2 181 180 0 0 0.909 0.931 - - 0.818 0.823 - - 0.861 0.861 - - 0.664 0.644 - -
C3 180 177 0 0 0.900 0.919 - - 0.822 0.764 - - 0.877 0.827 - - 0.673 0.636 - -
C4 184 177 0 0 0.924 0.946 - - 0.793 0.831 - - 0.848 0.882 - - 0.660 0.683 - -
C5 198 196 0 0 0.953 0.923 - - 0.827 0.792 - - 0.886 0.871 - - 0.677 0.667 - -
C6 216 218 0 46 0.836 0.870 - 0 0.810 0.784 - 0 0.856 0.821 - 0 0.645 0.639 - 0
C7 384 385 0 236 0.804 0.764 - 0 0.703 0.649 - 0 0.763 0.713 - 0 0.513 0.497 - 0
Th1 652 684 0 560 0.815 0.822 - 0.112 0.721 0.711 - 0.030 0.780 0.78 - 0.021 0.511 0.516 - 0.009
Th2 636 674 0 996 0.825 0.842 - 0.185 0.701 0.727 - 0.056 0.784 0.803 - 0.032 0.506 0.522 - 0.008
Th3 498 524 0 1,192 0.847 0.861 - 0.148 0.679 0.677 - 0.055 0.778 0.788 - 0.043 0.501 0.500 - 0.011
Th4 496 515 0 1,195 0.910 0.897 - 0.155 0.677 0.680 - 0.103 0.773 0.801 - 0.072 0.522 0.508 - 0.016
Th5 505 521 0 1,211 0.911 0.915 - 0.205 0.673 0.702 - 0.162 0.806 0.822 - 0.107 0.533 0.556 - 0.021
Th6 508 528 0 1,215 0.890 0.915 - 0.231 0.719 0.693 - 0.191 0.808 0.798 - 0.107 0.552 0.548 - 0.024
Th7 531 539 8 1,186 0.891 0.920 1 0.294 0.746 0.748 0 0.241 0.825 0.831 0 0.159 0.581 0.590 0 0.034
Th8 560 555 101 1,169 0.862 0.873 1 0.363 0.732 0.757 0 0.287 0.822 0.838 0.004 0.225 0.595 0.603 0.002 0.056
Th9 700 695 327 1,152 0.882 0.907 0.354 0.391 0.787 0.816 0.089 0.302 0.860 0.890 0.093 0.267 0.653 0.666 0.021 0.074
Th10 754 733 375 1,089 0.899 0.925 0.623 0.511 0.820 0.806 0.251 0.389 0.884 0.882 0.304 0.358 0.695 0.683 0.060 0.110
Th11 731 691 358 1,060 0.947 0.941 0.889 0.537 0.860 0.849 0.580 0.318 0.910 0.899 0.680 0.358 0.745 0.728 0.134 0.121
Th12 776 739 788 856 0.945 0.950 0.849 0.389 0.893 0.898 0.293 0.185 0.921 0.924 0.350 0.186 0.767 0.754 0.090 0.080
L1 1,322 1,248 1,471 319 0.922 0.913 0.770 0 0.795 0.778 0.474 0 0.859 0.854 0.533 0.011 0.697 0.682 0.199 0.005
L2 1,480 1,393 1,721 0 0.929 0.947 0.782 - 0.761 0.760 0.518 - 0.838 0.845 0.619 - 0.663 0.677 0.263 -
L3 1,623 1,567 1,895 0 0.936 0.925 0.750 - 0.760 0.751 0.536 - 0.843 0.838 0.606 - 0.670 0.662 0.256 -
L4 1,549 1,490 1,835 0 0.921 0.933 0.816 - 0.759 0.760 0.563 - 0.832 0.828 0.656 - 0.657 0.657 0.298 -
L5 1,665 1,598 1,983 0 0.913 0.909 0.748 - 0.846 0.832 0.509 - 0.904 0.884 0.611 - 0.722 0.700 0.275 -
Variable Dataset

VerSe 20
MSD T10
COVID-19
Performance type Validation Holdout External validation External validation
Dice
 Mean ± SD 0.750 ± 0.137 0.759 ± 0.119 0.770 ± 0.197 0.821 ± 0.142
 Median (IQR) 0.793 (0.122) 0.796 (0.128) 0.829 (0.127) 0.861 (0.110)
Jaccard
 Mean ± SD 0.615 ± 0.144 0.624 ± 0.134 0.656 ± 0.192 0.715 ± 0.142
 Median (IQR) 0.657 (0.162) 0.661 (0.171) 0.708 (0.181) 0.756 (0.168)
95th Percentile Hausdorff distance
 Mean ± SD 12.941 ± 12.346 12.383 ± 10.486 20.810 ± 14.604 22.832 ± 20.868
 Median (IQR) 8.062 (7.770) 8.000 (7.597) 18.000 (12.820) 18.028 (27.053)
Table 1. Summary of the patient and radiological characteristics

Values are presented as mean±standard deviation.

CT, computed tomography; NA, not available.

Voxel dimensions were only available for the entire respective dataset.

Table 2. Yolov8m performance during training and on the holdout sets

YOLOv8m, You-Only-Look-Once algorithm, Version 8 and size medium; mAP50, mean average precision (mAP) with Jaccard threshold of 0.5; mAP50-95, mAP with threshold steps of 0.05 between 0.5 and 0.95; Val, validation performance during training; Hold, holdout performance of the Verse20 set; Ext1, external validation on the MSD T10 liver scans; Ext2, external validation on coronavirus disease 2019 chest computed tomography.

Table 3. Performance of the U-Nets during both training and on held-out data

The metrics of both external validation sets are shown.

SD, standard deviation; IQR, interquartile range.