Fei Ningbo, Li Guangsheng, Wang Xuxiang, Li Junpeng, Hu Xiaosong, Hu Yong
Spinal Division, Orthopedic and Traumatology Center, The Affiliated Hospital of Guangdong Medical University, Zhanjiang 524013, China.
Department of Orthopaedics and Traumatology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China.
Diagnostics (Basel). 2023 Feb 21;13(5):817. doi: 10.3390/diagnostics13050817.
Cervical spondylotic myelopathy (CSM) is a chronic disorder of the spinal cord. ROI-based features on diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) provide additional information about spinal cord status, which would benefit the diagnosis and prognosis of CSM. However, the manual extraction of the DTI-related features on multiple ROIs is time-consuming and laborious. In total, 1159 slices at cervical levels from 89 CSM patients were analyzed, and corresponding fractional anisotropy (FA) maps were calculated. Eight ROIs were drawn, covering both sides of lateral, dorsal, ventral, and gray matter. The UNet model was trained with the proposed heatmap distance loss for auto-segmentation. Mean Dice coefficients on the test dataset for dorsal, lateral, and ventral column and gray matter were 0.69, 0.67, 0.57, 0.54 on the left side and 0.68, 0.67, 0.59, 0.55 on the right side. The ROI-based mean FA value based on segmentation model strongly correlated with the value based on manual drawing. The percentages of the mean absolute error between the two values of multiple ROIs were 0.07, 0.07, 0.11, and 0.08 on the left side and 0.07, 0.1, 0.1, 0.11, and 0.07 on the right side. The proposed segmentation model has the potential to offer a more detailed spinal cord segmentation and would be beneficial for quantifying a more detailed status of the cervical spinal cord.
脊髓型颈椎病(CSM)是一种脊髓慢性疾病。基于感兴趣区域(ROI)的扩散张量成像(DTI)特征可提供有关脊髓状态的额外信息,这将有助于CSM的诊断和预后评估。然而,在多个ROI上手动提取DTI相关特征既耗时又费力。共分析了89例CSM患者颈椎水平的1159层切片,并计算了相应的分数各向异性(FA)图。绘制了8个ROI,覆盖外侧、背侧、腹侧和灰质的两侧。使用提出的热图距离损失对UNet模型进行训练以实现自动分割。测试数据集上左侧背侧、外侧、腹侧柱和灰质的平均Dice系数分别为0.69、0.67、0.57、0.54,右侧分别为0.68、0.67、0.59、0.55。基于分割模型的基于ROI的平均FA值与基于手动绘制的值高度相关。多个ROI的两个值之间的平均绝对误差百分比在左侧分别为0.07、0.07、0.11和0.08,在右侧分别为0.07、0.1、0.1、0.11和0.07。所提出的分割模型有可能提供更详细的脊髓分割,并且有利于量化颈椎脊髓的更详细状态。