Multiple Axial Spine Indices Estimation via Dense Enhancing Network With Cross-Space Distance-Preserving Regularization
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Automatic estimation of axial spine indices is clinically desired for various spine computer aided procedures, such as disease diagnosis, therapeutic evaluation, pathophysiological understanding, risk assessment, and biomechanical modeling. Currently, the spine indices are manually measured by physicians, which is time-consuming and laborious. Even worse, the tedious manual procedure might result in inaccurate measurement. To deal with this problem, in this paper, we aim at developing an automatic method to estimate multiple indices from axial spine images. Inspired by the success of deep learning for regression problems and the densely connected network for image classification, we propose a dense enhancing network (DE-Net) which uses the dense enhancing blocks (DEBs) as its main body, where a feature enhancing layer is added to each of the bypass in a dense block. The DEB is designed to enhance discriminative feature embedding from the intervertebral disc and the dural sac areas. In addition, the cross-space distance-preserving regularization (CSDPR), which enforces consistent inter-sample distances between the output and the label spaces, is proposed to regularize the loss function of the DE-Net. To train and validate the proposed method, we collected 895 axial spine MRI images from 143 subjects and manually measured the indices as the ground truth. The results show that all deep learning models obtain very small prediction errors, and the proposed DE-Net with CSDPR acquires the smallest error among all methods, indicating that our method has great potential for spine computer aided procedures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".