Automatic diagnosis of disc bulge and disc herniation based on lumbar MR images using deep convolutional neural networks (Preprint)

BACKGROUND Lumbar abnormalities often lead to the lower back pain which has keep plaguing people’s lives. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is one of the most efficient techniques to detect lumbar diseases and widely used in clinic. How to interpret massive amounts of magnetic resonance (MR) images quickly and accurately is an urgent problem. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study is to present an automatic system to diagnosis of disc bulge and herniation which is time-saving and effective so that can reduce radiologists’ workload. METHODS The diagnosis of disorders of lumbar vertebral is highly dependent on medical images, therefore, we choose two most common diseases disc bulge and herniation as the research objects. The study is mainly about classification of the axial lumbar disc MR images using deep convolutional neural networks. RESULTS This system comprises of four steps. First step, automatic localizes vertebral bodies (including L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, and S1, L: Lumbar, S: Sacral) in sagittal images using the Faster R-CNN and 4-fold cross-validations show 100% accuracy respectively. Second step, automatically determine the corresponding disc of each axial lumbar disc MR images with 100% accuracy. In the third step, the accuracy to automatic localizes intervertebral disc region of interest (ROI) in axial MR images is 100%. The three classification (disc normal, disc bulge and disc herniation) accuracies in the last step in five groups (L1-L2, L2-L3, L3-L4, L4-L5, and L5-S1) are 92.7%, 84.4%, 92.1%, 90.4% and 84.2% respectively. CONCLUSIONS The automatic diagnosis system was successful built which can classify images of disc normal, disc bulge and disc herniation. This system provides an online test to interpret lumbar disc MR images which will be very helpful in improving the diagnostic efficiency and standardizing diagnosis reports, also, the system can be promoted to detect other lumbar abnormalities and cervical spondylosis.