Automatic detection of spina bifida occulta with deep learning methods from plain pelvic radiographs

Abstract

Purpose: Spina bifida occulta (SBO), which is the most common congenital spinal deformity, is often seen in the lower lumbar spine and sacrum. In this study, it is aimed to develop a computer-aided diagnosis method that will help clinicians in the diagnosis of spina bifida occulta from plain pelvic radiographs with deep learning methods and transfer learning method. Materials and methods: The You Only Look Once (YOLO) algorithm was used for object detection, and classification was made by applying transfer learning with a pre-trained VGG-19, ResNet-101, MobileNetV2, and GoogLeNet networks. Our dataset consisted of 206 normal lumbosacral radiographs and 160 SBO lumbosacral radiographs. The performance of the models was evaluated by metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, F1 score, and area under the ROC curve (AUC) results. Results: In the detection of SBO, 85.5%, 80.8%, 89.7%, 87.5%, 84%, and 0.92 accuracy, sensitivity, specificity, precision, F1 score, and AUC results were obtained with the pre-trained VGG-19 model, respectively. The pre-trained VGG-19 model performed better than the others. Conclusion: Successful results were obtained in this study performed to the diagnosis of SBO with deep learning methods. A model that will assist physicians in the diagnosis of SBO can be developed with new studies to be conducted with a large number of spinal radiographs. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to The Brazilian Society of Biomedical Engineering.