Enhancing spinal MRI segmentation with an asymmetric U-Net architecture
Spinal diseases are among the most prevalent health issues in modern society, significantly impacting patients’ quality of life. Diagnosing conditions such as disc herniation and spinal deformity requires advanced medical imaging techniques, including X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography, and nuclear magnetic resonance. Spine MRI is particularly crucial due to its ability to provide high-resolution images of soft tissues, essential for accurate diagnosis. However, the manual segmentation of spine MRI images is labor-intensive and inadequate for large-scale quantitative analysis. Thus, developing automated spinal MRI segmentation methods is critical to alleviating doctors’ workload and enhancing diagnostic efficiency. In this study, we propose a novel asymmetric U-Net architecture designed to improve the precision of reconstructing complex structures and details by increasing the depth of the upsampling side. The model incorporates adjacent-scale skip connections to control parameters while maintaining high segmentation accuracy. In addition, residual connections on the upsampling side prevent gradient vanishing, thereby enhancing the network’s feature learning and representation capabilities. Experimental results indicate that this method significantly reduces training time and increases model accuracy compared to traditional approaches, marking a substantial advancement in automated spinal MRI segmentation. This innovative approach holds promise for improving clinical outcomes and optimizing the workflow in medical imaging departments.
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