论文标题
通过结构化多输出回归直接估算脊柱COBB角度
Direct Estimation of Spinal Cobb Angles by Structured Multi-Output Regression
论文作者
论文摘要
定量评估脊柱曲率的COBB角在脊柱侧弯诊断和治疗中起重要作用。这些角度的常规测量遭受了巨大的可变性和由于密集的手动干预而导致的可靠性较低。但是,由于椎骨边界周围存在很高的歧义性和可变性,因此自动获得Cobb角度挑战。在本文中,我们将脊柱X射线的COBB角度估算为多输出回归任务。我们提出结构化支持矢量回归(S^2VR),以在一个单个框架中共同估计X射线中脊柱的Cobb角度和地标。所提出的S^2VR可以忠实地处理输入图像和定量输出之间的非线性关系,同时明确捕获输出的内在相关性。我们介绍了歧管正则化以利用输出空间的几何形状。我们建议通过内核目标对齐来学习S2VR中的内核,以增强其歧视能力。在439位脊柱侧弯受试者的脊柱X射线数据集上评估了该方法,该数据集获得了92.76%的启发性相关系数,由人类专家手动获得的地面真相,并胜过两种基线方法。我们的方法以高精度来直接估算COBB角度,这表明其在临床使用中的巨大潜力。
The Cobb angle that quantitatively evaluates the spinal curvature plays an important role in the scoliosis diagnosis and treatment. Conventional measurement of these angles suffers from huge variability and low reliability due to intensive manual intervention. However, since there exist high ambiguity and variability around boundaries of vertebrae, it is challenging to obtain Cobb angles automatically. In this paper, we formulate the estimation of the Cobb angles from spinal X-rays as a multi-output regression task. We propose structured support vector regression (S^2VR) to jointly estimate Cobb angles and landmarks of the spine in X-rays in one single framework. The proposed S^2VR can faithfully handle the nonlinear relationship between input images and quantitative outputs, while explicitly capturing the intrinsic correlation of outputs. We introduce the manifold regularization to exploit the geometry of the output space. We propose learning the kernel in S2VR by kernel target alignment to enhance its discriminative ability. The proposed method is evaluated on the spinal X-rays dataset of 439 scoliosis subjects, which achieves the inspiring correlation coefficient of 92.76% with ground truth obtained manually by human experts and outperforms two baseline methods. Our method achieves the direct estimation of Cobb angles with high accuracy, which indicates its great potential in clinical use.