SERIOUS DISC BULGE DETECTION IN AXIAL MR IMAGE OF LUMBAR SPINE USING CNN AND IMAGE EXPLAINER

Disc bulge happens when the nucleus pulposus pushes outward through the annulus fibrosusand progresses over time, which can resultin disc degeneration problems such as spinal stenosis and sciatica. Serious bulges on the disc can put pressure on the surrounding nerve roots, sending pain down the spine and into other body regions. In this paper, a convolutional neural network (CNN) model wasdeveloped to diagnose composite axial MRI scans. The dataset used comprises 515 patients who reported lower back pain. It includes the last 3 lumbar spine discs, D3(L3-L4), D4(L4-L5), and D5(L5-S1)for each of the patients. The model achieved remarkable accuracy, recall, precision and F1scoreof89%. Local Interpretable Model-Agnostic Explanations (LIME) was alsoimplemented to explain the model’s decision, henceremoving the black box problem generally associated with AImodels.This ensures the model provides interpretable insights, making it accurateand reliable.