Femoral image segmentation based on two-stage convolutional network using 3D-DMFNet and 3D-ResUnet

Abstract

Objective: The femur is a typical human long bone with an irregular spatial structure. Femoral fractures are the most common occurrence in middle-aged and older adults. The structure of human bone tissue is very complex, and there are significant differences between individuals. Segmenting bone tissue is a challenging task and of great practical significance.

Methods: Our research is based on segmenting and the three-dimensional reconstruction of femoral images using X-ray imaging. The currently commonly used two-dimensional fully convolutional network Unet has the problem of ignoring spatial position information and losing too much feature information. The commonly used three-dimensional fully convolutional network 3D Unet has the problem of ignoring spatial position information and losing too much feature information. For the problem of many model parameters, we proposes a two-stage network segmentation model composed of 3D-DMFNet and 3D-ResUnet networks and trains the network in stages to segment the femur. One stage is used to detect the coarse segmentation of the femur range, and one stage is used for the fine segmentation of the femur so that the training speed is fast and the segmentation accuracy is moderate, which is suitable for detecting the femur range.

Results: The experimental dataset used in this paper is from The Second Affiliated Hospital of Fujian Medical University, which consists of 30 sets of femur X-ray images. The experiment compares the accuracy and loss value of Unet and the two-stage convolutional network. The image shows that the two-stage convolutional network has higher accuracy. At the same time, this paper shows the effect of the two-stage coarse segmentation and fine segmentation of medical images. Subsequently, this paper applies the model to practice and obtains the model's Dice, Sensitivity, Specificity and Pixel Accuracy values. After comparative analysis, the experimental results show that the two-stage network segmentation model composed of 3D-DMFNet and 3D-ResUnet network designed in this paper has higher accuracy, intuitiveness, and more application value than traditional image segmentation algorithms.

Conclusion: With the continuous application of X-ray images in clinical diagnosis using femoral images, the method in this paper is expected to become a diagnostic tool that can effectively improve the accuracy and loss of femoral image segmentation and the three-dimensional reconstruction.

Keywords: Femoral image; Image Segmentation; Medical diagnosis; Two-stage convolutional network; Unet.