There has been a significant increase from 2010 to 2016 in the number of people suffering from spine problems. The automatic image segmentation of the spine obtained from a computed tomography (CT) image is important for diagnosing spine conditions and for performing surgery with computer-assisted surgery systems. The spine has a complex anatomy that consists of 33 vertebrae, 23 intervertebral disks, the spinal cord, and connecting ribs. As a result, the spinal surgeon is faced with the challenge of needing a robust algorithm to segment and create a model of the spine. In this study, we developed a fully automatic segmentation method to segment the spine from CT images, and we compared our segmentation results with reference segmentations obtained by well-known methods. We use a hybrid method. This method combines the convolutional neural network (CNN) and fully convolutional network (FCN), and utilizes class redundancy as a soft constraint to greatly improve the segmentation results. The proposed method was found to significantly enhance the accuracy of the segmentation results and the system processing time. Our comparison was based on 12 measurements: the Dice coefficient (94%), Jaccard index (93%), volumetric similarity (96%), sensitivity (97%), specificity (99%), precision (over segmentation 8.3 and under segmentation 2.6), accuracy (99%), Matthews correlation coefficient (0.93), mean surface distance (0.16 mm), Hausdorff distance (7.4 mm), and global consistency error (0.02). We experimented with CT images from 32 patients, and the experimental results demonstrated the efficiency of the proposed method. Highlights A method to enhance the accuracy of spine segmentation from CT data was proposed. The proposed method uses Convolutional Neural Network via redundant generation of class labels. Experiments show the segmentation accuracy has been enhanced.

Lower back pain is one of the major global challenges in health problems. Medical imaging is rapidly taking a predominant position for the diagnosis and treatment of lower back abnormalities. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a primary tool for detecting anatomical and functional abnormalities in the intervertebral disc (IVD) and provides valuable data for both diagnosis and research. Deep learning methods perform well in computer visioning when labeled general image training data are abundant. In the practice of medical images, the labeled data or the segmentation data are produced manually. However, manual medical image segmentation leads to two main issues: much time is needed for delineation, and reproducibility is called into question. To handle this problem, we developed an automated approach for IVD instance segmentation that can utilize T1 and T2 images during this study to handle data limitation problems and computational time problems and improve the generalization of the algorithm. This method builds upon mask-RCNN; we proposed a multistage optimization mask-RCNN (MOM-RCNN) for deep learning segmentation networks. We used a multi-optimization training system by utilizing stochastic gradient descent and adaptive moment estimation (Adam) with T1 and T2 in MOM-RCNN. The proposed method showed a significant improvement in processing time and segmentation results compared to previous commonly used segmentation methods. We evaluated the results using several different key performance measures. We obtain the Dice coefficient (99%). Our method can define the IVD’s segmentation as much as 88% (sensitivity) and recognize the non-IVD as much as 98% (specificity). The results also obtained increasing precision (92%) with a low global consistency error (0.03), approaching 0 (the best possible score). On the spatial distance measures, the results show a promising reduction from 0.407 ± 0.067 mm in root mean square error to 0.095 ± 0.026 mm, Hausdorff distance from 12.313 ± 3.015 to 5.155 ± 1.561 mm, and average symmetric surface distance from 1.944 ± 0.850 to 0.49 ± 0.23 mm compared to other state-of-the-art methods. We used MRI images from 263 patients to demonstrate the efficiency of our proposed method.

Venipuncture is an important health diagnosis process. Although venipuncture is one of the most commonly performed procedures in medical environments, locating the veins of infants, obese, anemic, or colored patients is still an arduous task even for skilled practitioners. To solve this problem, several devices using infrared light have recently become commercially available. However, such devices for venipuncture share a common drawback, especially when visualizing deep veins or veins of a thick part of the body like the cubital fossa. This paper proposes a new vein-visualizing device applying a new penetration method using near-infrared (NIR) light. The light module is attached directly on to the declared area of the skin. Then, NIR beam is rayed from two sides of the light module to the vein with a specific angle. This gives a penetration effect. In addition, through an image processing procedure, the vein structure is enhanced to show it more accurately. Through a phantom study, the most effective penetration angle of the NIR module is decided. Additionally, the feasibility of the device is verified through experiments in vivo. The prototype allows us to visualize the vein patterns of thicker body parts, such as arms.