Identification and tracking of vertebrae in ultrasound using deep networks with unsupervised feature learning
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Percutaneous needle insertion procedures on the spine often require proper identification of the vertebral level in order to effectively deliver anesthetics and analgesic agents to achieve adequate block. For example, in obstetric epidurals, the target is at the L3-L4 intervertebral space. The current clinical method involves “blind” identification of the vertebral level through manual palpation of the spine, which has only 30% accuracy. This implies the need for better anatomical identification prior to needle insertion. A system is proposed to identify the vertebrae, assigning them to their respective levels, and track them in a standard sequence of ultrasound images, when imaged in the paramedian plane. Machine learning techniques are developed to identify discriminative features of the laminae. In particular, a deep network is trained to automatically learn the anatomical features of the lamina peaks, and classify image patches, for pixel-level classification. The chosen network utilizes multiple connected auto-encoders to learn the anatomy. Pre-processing with ultrasound bone enhancement techniques is done to aid the pixel-level classification performance. Once the lamina are identified, vertebrae are assigned levels and tracked in sequential frames. Experimental results were evaluated against an expert sonographer. Based on data acquired from 15 subjects, vertebrae identification with sensitivity of 95% and precision of 95% was achieved within each frame. Between pairs of subsequently analyzed frames, matches of predicted vertebral level labels were correct in 94% of cases, when compared to matches of manually selected labels
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it