Mask R-CNN assisted diagnosis of spinal tuberculosis

The prevalence of spinal tuberculosis (ST) is particularly high in underdeveloped regions with inadequate medical conditions. This not only leads to misdiagnosis and delays in treatment progress but also contributes to the continued transmission of tuberculosis bacteria, posing a risk to other individuals. Currently, CT imaging is extensively utilized in computer-aided diagnosis (CAD). The main features of ST on CT images include bone destruction, osteosclerosis, sequestration formation, and intervertebral disc damage. However, manual diagnosis by doctors may result in subjective judgments and misdiagnosis. Therefore, an accurate and objective method is needed for diagnosing of spinal tuberculosis. In this paper, we put forward an assistive diagnostic approach for spinal tuberculosis that is based on deep learning. The approach uses the Mask R-CNN model. Moreover, we modify the original model network by incorporating the ResPath and cbam* to improve the performance metrics, namely <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mi>m</mml:mi><mml:mi>A</mml:mi><mml:msub><mml:mi>P</mml:mi><mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mi>small</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:mrow></mml:msub></mml:math> and <i>F1-score</i>. Meanwhile, other deep learning models such as Faster-RCNN and SSD were also compared. Experimental results demonstrate that the enhanced model can effectively identify spinal tuberculosis lesions, with an <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"><mml:mi>m</mml:mi><mml:mi>A</mml:mi><mml:msub><mml:mi>P</mml:mi><mml:mrow><mml:mrow><mml:mi>small</mml:mi></mml:mrow></mml:mrow></mml:msub></mml:math> of 0.9175, surpassing the original model's 0.8340, and an <i>F1-score</i> of 0.9335, outperforming the original model's 0.8657.