Cervical Intervertebral Disc Segmentation Based on Multi-Scale Information Fusion and Its Application

Abstract

The cervical intervertebral disc, a cushion-like element between the vertebrae, plays a critical role in spinal health. Investigating how to segment these discs is crucial for identifying abnormalities in cervical conditions. This paper introduces a novel approach for segmenting cervical intervertebral discs, utilizing a framework based on multi-scale information fusion. Central to this approach is the integration of multi-level features, both low and high, through an encoding–decoding process, combined with multi-scale semantic fusion, to progressively refine the extraction of segmentation characteristics. The multi-scale semantic fusion aspect of this framework is divided into two phases: one leveraging convolution for scale interaction and the other utilizing pooling. This dual-phase method markedly improves segmentation accuracy. Facing a shortage of datasets for cervical disc segmentation, we have developed a new dataset tailored for this purpose, which includes interpolation between layers to resolve disparities in pixel spacing along the longitudinal and transverse axes in CT image sequences. This dataset is good for advancing cervical disc segmentation studies. Our experimental findings demonstrate that our network model not only achieves good segmentation accuracy on human cervical intervertebral discs but is also highly effective for three-dimensional reconstruction and printing applications. The dataset will be publicly available soon.