Osteoporosis is a bone-related disease characterized by decreased bone density and mass, leading to brittle fractures. Osteoporosis assessment from radiographs using a deep learning algorithm has proven a low-cost alternative to the golden standard DXA. Due to the considerable noise and low contrast, automated diagnosis of osteoporosis in X-ray images still poses a significant challenge for traditional diagnostic methods. In this paper, an end-to-end transformer-style network was proposed, termed FCoTNet, to overcome the shortcoming of insufficient fusion of texture information and local features in the traditional CoTNet. To extract complementary geometric representations at each scale of the transformer module, we integrated parallel multi-scale feature extraction architectures in each unit layer of FCoTNet to utilize convolution to aggregate features from different receptive fields. Moreover, in order to extract small-scale texture features which were more critical to the diagnosis of osteoporosis in radiographs, larger fusion weights were assigned to the feature maps with small-size receptive fields. Afterward, the multi-scale global modeling was conducted by self-attention mechanism. The proposed model was first investigated on a private lumbar spine X-ray dataset with the 5-fold cross-validation strategy, obtaining an average accuracy of 78.29 & PLUSMN; 0.93 %, an average sensitivity of 69.72 & PLUSMN; 2.35 %, and an average specificity of 88.92 & PLUSMN; 0.67 % for the multi-classification of normal, osteopenia, and osteoporosis categories. We then conducted a controlled trial with five orthopedic clinicians to evaluate the clinical value of the model. The average clinician's accuracy improved from 61.50 & PLUSMN; 10.79 % unaided to 80.00 & PLUSMN; 5.92 % aided (18.50 % improvement), sensitivity improved from 64.38 & PLUSMN; 8.07 % unaided to 83.31 & PLUSMN; 5.43 % aided (18.93 % improvement), and specificity improved from 80.11 & PLUSMN; 4.72 % unaided to 89.94 & PLUSMN; 3.82 % aided (9.83 % improvement). Meanwhile, the prediction consistency among clinicians significantly improved with the assistance of FCoTNet. Furthermore, the proposed model showed good robustness on an external test dataset. These investigations indicate that the proposed deep learning model achieves state-of-the-art performance for osteoporosis prediction, which substantially improves osteoporosis screening and reduced osteoporosis fractures.
基金:
Research Fund for Foundation of Hebei University [DXK201914]; Hebei University [XZJJ201914]; Post-graduate's Innovation Fund Project of Hebei University [HBU2022SS003]; Special Project for Cultivating College Students' Scientific and Technological Innovation Ability in Hebei Province [22E50041D]; Guangdong Basic and Applied Basic Research Foundation [2021A1515011654]; Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China [20720210117]
第一作者机构:[1]Hebei Univ, Coll Qual & Tech Supervis, Baoding 071002, Peoples R China
通讯作者:
通讯机构:[1]Hebei Univ, Coll Qual & Tech Supervis, Baoding 071002, Peoples R China[2]Hebei Technol Innovat Ctr Lightweight New Energy V, Baoding 071002, Peoples R China[3]Hebei Univ, Natl & Local Joint Engn Res Ctr Metrol Instrument, Baoding 071002, Peoples R China[*1]College of Quality and Technical Supervision, Hebei University, Baoding 071002, China.
推荐引用方式(GB/T 7714):
Xue Linyan,Qin Geng,Chang Shilong,et al.Osteoporosis prediction in lumbar spine X-ray images using the multi-scale weighted fusion contextual transformer network[J].ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN MEDICINE.2023,143:doi:10.1016/j.artmed.2023.102639.
APA:
Xue, Linyan,Qin, Geng,Chang, Shilong,Luo, Cheng,Hou, Ya...&Yang, Kun.(2023).Osteoporosis prediction in lumbar spine X-ray images using the multi-scale weighted fusion contextual transformer network.ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN MEDICINE,143,
MLA:
Xue, Linyan,et al."Osteoporosis prediction in lumbar spine X-ray images using the multi-scale weighted fusion contextual transformer network".ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN MEDICINE 143.(2023)