Vertebra-Focused Landmark Detection for Scoliosis Assessment
This work addresses the need for more reliable diagnostic tools for clinicians treating adolescent idiopathic scoliosis, representing an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of inaccurate vertebra landmark detection for Cobb angle measurement in scoliosis assessment by proposing a vertebra-focused method that localizes centers and traces corner landmarks, achieving improved results on low-contrast X-ray images.
Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) is a lifetime disease that arises in children. Accurate estimation of Cobb angles of the scoliosis is essential for clinicians to make diagnosis and treatment decisions. The Cobb angles are measured according to the vertebrae landmarks. Existing regression-based methods for the vertebra landmark detection typically suffer from large dense mapping parameters and inaccurate landmark localization. The segmentation-based methods tend to predict connected or corrupted vertebra masks. In this paper, we propose a novel vertebra-focused landmark detection method. Our model first localizes the vertebra centers, based on which it then traces the four corner landmarks of the vertebra through the learned corner offset. In this way, our method is able to keep the order of the landmarks. The comparison results demonstrate the merits of our method in both Cobb angle measurement and landmark detection on low-contrast and ambiguous X-ray images. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/yijingru/Vertebra-Landmark-Detection}.