Lyu Juan, Ling Sai Ho, Banerjee S, Zheng J Y, Lai K L, Yang D, Zheng Y P, Bi Xiaojun, Su Steven, Chamoli Uphar
College of Information and Communication Engineering, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, China.
School of Biomedical Engineering, University of Technology Sydney, Ultimo, NSW 2007, Australia.
Comput Med Imaging Graph. 2021 Apr;89:101847. doi: 10.1016/j.compmedimag.2020.101847. Epub 2021 Jan 11.
Periodic inspection and assessment are important for scoliosis patients. 3D ultrasound imaging has become an important means of scoliosis assessment as it is a real-time, cost-effective and radiation-free imaging technique. With the generation of a 3D ultrasound volume projection spine image using our Scolioscan system, a series of 2D coronal ultrasound images are produced at different depths with different qualities. Selecting a high quality image from these 2D images is the crucial task for further scoliosis measurement. However, adjacent images are similar and difficult to distinguish. To learn the nuances between these images, we propose selecting the best image automatically, based on their quality rankings. Here, the ranking algorithm we use is a pairwise learning-to-ranking network, RankNet. Then, to extract more efficient features of input images and to improve the discriminative ability of the model, we adopt the convolutional neural network as the backbone due to its high power of image exploration. Finally, by inputting the images in pairs into the proposed convolutional RankNet, we can select the best images from each case based on the output ranking orders. The experimental result shows that convolutional RankNet achieves better than 95.5% top-3 accuracy, and we prove that this performance is beyond the experience of a human expert.
定期检查和评估对脊柱侧弯患者很重要。三维超声成像已成为脊柱侧弯评估的重要手段,因为它是一种实时、经济高效且无辐射的成像技术。使用我们的脊柱侧弯扫描系统生成三维超声容积投影脊柱图像时,会在不同深度生成一系列质量不同的二维冠状超声图像。从这些二维图像中选择高质量图像是进一步进行脊柱侧弯测量的关键任务。然而,相邻图像相似且难以区分。为了了解这些图像之间的细微差别,我们建议基于质量排名自动选择最佳图像。这里,我们使用的排名算法是成对学习排名网络RankNet。然后,为了提取输入图像更有效的特征并提高模型的判别能力,由于其强大的图像探索能力,我们采用卷积神经网络作为主干。最后,通过将图像成对输入到所提出的卷积RankNet中,我们可以根据输出排名顺序从每个病例中选择最佳图像。实验结果表明,卷积RankNet的前3准确率优于95.5%,并且我们证明这种性能超出了人类专家的经验。