Cervical spine fracture detection in computed tomography using convolutional neural networks

Abstract

Objective:
In the context of primary in-hospital trauma management timely reading of computed tomography (CT) images is critical. However, assessment of the spine is time consuming, fractures can be very subtle, and the potential for under-diagnosis or delayed diagnosis is relevant. 
Artificial intelligence is increasingly employed to assist radiologists with the detection of spinal fractures and prioritization of cases.
Currently, algorithms focusing on the cervical spine are commercially available.
A common approach is the vertebra-wise classification.
Instead of a classification task, we formulate fracture detection as a segmentation task aiming to find and display all individual fracture locations presented in the image.\\ 
Approach:
Based on 195 CT examinations, 454 cervical spine fractures were identified and annotated by radiologists at a tertiary trauma centre. 
We trained for the detection a U-Net via 4-fold-cross validation to segment spine fractures and the spine via a multi-task loss. 
We further compared advantages of two image reformation approaches - straightened curved planar reformatted (CPR) around the spine and spinal canal aligned volumes of interest (VOI) - to achieve a unified vertebral alignment in comparison to processing the Cartesian data directly.
Main results:
Of the three data versions (Cartesian, reformatted, VOI) the VOI approach showed the best detection rate and a reduced computation time. The proposed algorithm was able to detect 87.2\% of cervical spine fractures at an average number of false positives of 3.5 per case. Evaluation of the method on a public spine dataset resulted in 0.9 false positive detections per cervical spine case. 
Significance:
The display of individual fracture locations as provided with high sensitivity by the proposed voxel classification based fracture detection has the potential to support the trauma CT reading workflow by reducing missed findings. 

Machine Learning and Deep Learning in Spinal Injury: A Narrative Review of Algorithms in Diagnosis and Prognosis

“…Golla et al in 2023 used convolutional neural networks to detect cervical spine fractures from CT scans. Their algorithm detected 87.2% of fractures with an average of 3.5 false positives per case, using a spinal canal aligned volumes of interest (VOI) approach [48]. Small et al evaluated a CNN developed by Aidoc for detecting cervical spine fractures using CT scans, reporting a 92% accuracy rate with 76% sensitivity and 97% specificity [26].…”