自动分割多方向脊柱X光片,提升侧弯评估准确性
R2MF-Net: A Recurrent Residual Multi-Path Fusion Network for Robust Multi-directional Spine X-ray Segmentation
- 分两阶段设计:粗分割+精分割,融合多路径特征
- 在228组数据上实现高精度分割,抗低对比度与遮挡
- 适合临床医生做脊柱侧弯量化评估,尤其影像质量差时
准确分割脊柱X光图像中的脊椎结构是进行定量侧弯评估(如柯布角测量、椎体移位估计和弯曲分类)的前提。临床上,医生需获取正位、左弯和右弯三组影像联合评估畸形程度与脊柱柔韧性。然而,当前分割仍高度依赖人工,耗时且不可复现,尤其在低对比度图像或存在肋骨阴影、组织重叠时。为此,本文提出R2MF-Net,一种专为多方向脊柱X光图像设计的递归残差多路径编码器-解码器网络。整体结构由粗分割与精分割两阶段串联构成,均采用改进的Inception式多分支特征提取器,并在跳接路径中引入递归残差跳跃模块(R2-Jump),逐步对齐编码器与解码器语义。多尺度跨阶段跳接(MC-Skip)机制使精分割网络可复用粗分割网络多个解码层级的层次化表示,增强跨成像方向与对比度条件下的分割稳定性。此外,在瓶颈层采用轻量级空间-通道压缩激励块(SCSE-Lite),突出脊柱相关激活,抑制无关结构与背景噪声。我们在包含228组正位、左弯、右弯脊柱X光图像的临床多视角数据集上进行评估,所有图像均有专家标注。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Accurate segmentation of spinal structures in X-ray images is a prerequisite for quantitative scoliosis assessment, including Cobb angle measurement, vertebral translation estimation and curvature classification. In routine practice, clinicians acquire coronal, left-bending and right-bending radiographs to jointly evaluate deformity severity and spinal flexibility. However, the segmentation step remains heavily manual, time-consuming and non-reproducible, particularly in low-contrast images and in the presence of rib shadows or overlapping tissues. To address these limitations, this paper proposes R2MF-Net, a recurrent residual multi-path encoder--decoder network tailored for automatic segmentation of multi-directional spine X-ray images. The overall design consists of a coarse segmentation network and a fine segmentation network connected in cascade. Both stages adopt an improved Inception-style multi-branch feature extractor, while a recurrent residual jump connection (R2-Jump) module is inserted into skip paths to gradually align encoder and decoder semantics. A multi-scale cross-stage skip (MC-Skip) mechanism allows the fine network to reuse hierarchical representations from multiple decoder levels of the coarse network, thereby strengthening the stability of segmentation across imaging directions and contrast conditions. Furthermore, a lightweight spatial-channel squeeze-and-excitation block (SCSE-Lite) is employed at the bottleneck to emphasize spine-related activations and suppress irrelevant structures and background noise. We evaluate R2MF-Net on a clinical multi-view radiograph dataset comprising 228 sets of coronal, left-bending and right-bending spine X-ray images with expert annotations.
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