EEB7-UNet: a deep learning framework for automated segmentation of fractured C-spine vertebrae

Abstract

Accurate identification of vertebral fracture (VF) regions in computed tomography (CT) images is crucial for surgeons prior to treatment planning, but remains challenging due to irregular vertebral boundaries, low contrast, noise, and image unevenness. Recent advancements in deep learning have shown promising results compared to conventional manual diagnosis methods in detecting anomalies and segmenting regions of interest in medical imaging. In this study, a deep learning model, enhanced EfficientNetB7 U-Net (EEB7-UNet), is proposed to segment the fractured cervical vertebrae. It includes custom data augmentation to increase the data size and a hybrid learning rate scheduler strategy technique for faster convergence, which increases the generalizability and robustness of the model. The proposed model achieved an improved dice score index of 95.53% and Jaccard coefficient index of 93.85% on the test dataset. Furthermore, the EEB7-UNet has emerged as a moderate size with 98.6 MB. The approach yields superior performance in terms of dice score index and Jaccard coefficient index compared to the other state of the art convolutional neural network (CNN) used as an encoder in the U-Net. This research also compared the performance of the proposed model with three other studies in similar contexts, reported in the literature.