Automatic Cobb Angle Detection using Vertebra Detector and Vertebra Corners Regression
This work addresses the need for faster and more consistent scoliosis diagnosis in medical imaging, though it is incremental as it builds on existing detection and regression techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of automating Cobb angle measurement for scoliosis assessment by proposing a method that detects vertebrae and regresses their corners, achieving a SMAPE score of 25.69 on a challenge test set.
Correct evaluation and treatment of Scoliosis require accurate estimation of spinal curvature. Current gold standard is to manually estimate Cobb Angles in spinal X-ray images which is time consuming and has high inter-rater variability. We propose an automatic method with a novel framework that first detects vertebrae as objects followed by a landmark detector that estimates the 4 landmark corners of each vertebra separately. Cobb Angles are calculated using the slope of each vertebra obtained from the predicted landmarks. For inference on test data, we perform pre and post processings that include cropping, outlier rejection and smoothing of the predicted landmarks. The results were assessed in AASCE MICCAI challenge 2019 which showed a promise with a SMAPE score of 25.69 on the challenge test set.