Scoliosis is a common spinal condition where the spine curves to the side and thus deforms the spine. Curvature estimation provides a powerful index to evaluate the deformation severity of scoliosis. In current clinical diagnosis, the standard curvature estimation method for assessing the curvature quantitatively is done by measuring the Cobb angle, which is the angle between two lines, drawn perpendicular to the upper endplate of the uppermost vertebra involved and the lower endplate of the lowest vertebra involved. However, manual measurement of spine curvature requires considerable time and effort, along with associated problems such as interobserver and intraobserver variations. In this article, we propose an automatic system for measuring spine curvature using the anterior-posterior (AP) view spinal X-ray images. Due to the characteristic of AP view images, we first reduced the image size and then used horizontal and vertical intensity projection histograms to define the region of interest of the spine which is then cropped for sequential processing. Next, the boundaries of the spine, the central spinal curve line, and the spine foreground are detected by using intensity and gradient information of the region of interest, and a progressive thresholding approach is then employed to detect the locations of the vertebrae. In order to reduce the influences of inconsistent intensity distribution of vertebrae in the spine AP image, we applied the deep learning convolutional neural network (CNN) approaches which include the U-Net, the Dense U-Net, and Residual U-Net, to segment the vertebrae. Finally, the segmentation results of the vertebrae are reconstructed into a complete segmented spine image, and the spine curvature is calculated based on the Cobb angle criterion. In the experiments, we showed the results for spine segmentation and spine curvature; the results were then compared to manual measurements by specialists. The segmentation results of the Residual U-Net were superior to the other two convolutional neural networks. The one-way ANOVA test also demonstrated that the three measurements including the manual records of two different physicians and our proposed measured record were not significantly different in terms of spine curvature measurement. Looking forward, the proposed system can be applied in clinical diagnosis to assist doctors for a better understanding of scoliosis severity and for clinical treatments.

Carpal tunnel syndrome commonly occurs in individuals working in occupations that involve use of vibrating manual tools or tasks with highly repetitive and forceful manual exertion. In recent years, carpal tunnel syndrome has been evaluated by ultrasound imaging that monitors median nerve movement. Conventional image analysis methods, such as the active contour model, are typically used to expedite automatic segmentation of the median nerve, but these usually suffer from an arduous manual intervention. We propose a new convolutional neural network framework for localization and segmentation of the median nerve, called DeepNerve, that is based on the U-Net model. DeepNerve integrates the characteristics of MaskTrack and convolutional long short-term memory to effectively locate and segment the median nerve. On the basis of experimental results, the proposed model achieved high performance and generated average Dice measurement, precision, recall and F-score values of 0.8975, 0.8912, 0.9119 and 0.9015, respectively. The segmentation results of DeepNerve were significantly improved in comparison with those of conventional active contour models. Additionally, the results of Student's t-test revealed significant differences in four deformation measurements of the median nerve, including area, perimeter, aspect ratio and circularity. We conclude that the proposed DeepNerve not only generates satisfactory results for localization and segmentation of the median nerve, but also creates more promising measurements for applications in clinical carpal tunnel syndrome diagnosis.

Accurate automatic spike detection is highly beneficial to clinical assessment of epileptic electroencephalogram (EEG) data. In this paper, a new two-stage approach is proposed for epileptic spike detection. First, the k-point nonlinear energy operator (k-NEO) is adopted to detect all possible spike candidates, then a newly proposed spike model with slow wave features is applied to these candidates for spike classification. Experimental results show that the proposed system, using the AdaBoost classifier, outperforms the conventional method in both two- and three-class EEG pattern classification problems. The proposed system not only achieves better accuracy for spike detection, but also provides new ability to differentiate between spikes and spikes with slow waves. Though spikes with slow waves occur frequently in epileptic EEGs, they are not used in conventional spike detection. Identifying spikes with slow waves allows the proposed system to have better capability for assisting clinical neurologists in routine EEG examinations and epileptic diagnosis.