Automatic Calculation of Cervical Spine Parameters Using Deep Learning: Development and Validation on an External Dataset

Abstract

Study design

Retrospective data analysis.

Objectives

This study aims to develop a deep learning model for the automatic calculation of some important spine parameters from lateral cervical radiographs.

Methods

We collected two datasets from two different institutions. The first dataset of 1498 images was used to train and optimize the model to find the best hyperparameters while the second dataset of 79 images was used as an external validation set to evaluate the robustness and generalizability of our model. The performance of the model was assessed by calculating the median absolute errors between the model prediction and the ground truth for the following parameters: T1 slope, C7 slope, C2-C7 angle, C2-C6 angle, Sagittal Vertical Axis (SVA), C0-C2, Redlund-Johnell distance (RJD), the cranial tilting (CT) and the craniocervical angle (CCA).

Results

Regarding the angles, we found median errors of 1.66° (SD 2.46°), 1.56° (1.95°), 2.46° (SD 2.55), 1.85° (SD 3.93°), 1.25° (SD 1.83°), .29° (SD .31°) and .67° (SD .77°) for T1 slope, C7 slope, C2-C7, C2-C6, C0-C2, CT, and CCA respectively. As concerns the distances, we found median errors of .55 mm (SD .47 mm) and .47 mm (.62 mm) for SVA and RJD respectively.

Conclusions

In this work, we developed a model that was able to accurately predict cervical spine parameters from lateral cervical radiographs. In particular, the performances on the external validation set demonstrate the robustness and the high degree of generalizability of our model on images acquired in a different institution.