Intelligent Medical System for Diagnosis of Intervertebral Disc Deformation

The article examines the application of semi-supervised learning and computer vision methods for segmentation of spine MR images and diagnosis of deformation of intervertebral discs. Existing neural network architectures for spine MR image segmentation and semi-supervised learning methods used in medical image segmentation are reviewed. A system for diagnosis deformation of intervertebral discs is proposed, which consists of two modules: a segmentation module and a diagnostic module. The implementation of the proposed system using two convolutional neural networks is presented: U-Net for segmentation of spine MR images and ResNet for classification of the degree of deformation of each intervertebral disc based on the Pfirrmann classification of degenerative changes. The software implementation of the medical diagnosis system was developed in the Python programming language using the PyTorch library. Neural networks were trained on an open dataset of spine MR images using a variant of the Mean Teacher semi-supervised learning method. As a result of the verification, it was found that the system is capable of performing segmentation with high accuracy. It was found that the exact prediction of the grade of degenerative changes according to Pfirrmann remains a difficult task, but the introduction of another classification made it possible to increase the accuracy of diagnosis of deformation of intervertebral discs. The proposed medical system involves the addition of new diagnostic modules, which makes it possible to use it for the comprehensive analysis of various spine diseases