Lumbar spine localisation method based on feature fusion

To eliminate unnecessary background information, such as soft tissues in original CT images and the adverse impact of the similarity of adjacent spines on lumbar image segmentation and surgical path planning, a two-stage approach for localising lumbar segments is proposed. First, based on the multi-scale feature fusion technology, a non-linear regression method is used to achieve accurate localisation of the overall spatial region of the lumbar spine, effectively eliminating useless background information, such as soft tissues. In the second stage, we directly realised the precise positioning of each segment in the lumbar spine space region based on the non-linear regression method, thus effectively eliminating the interference caused by the adjacent spine. The 3D Intersection over Union (3D_IOU) is used as the main evaluation indicator for the positioning accuracy. On an open dataset, 3D_IOU values of 0.8339 +/- 0.0990 and 0.8559 +/- 0.0332 in the first and second stages, respectively is achieved. In addition, the average time required for the proposed method in the two stages is 0.3274 and 0.2105 s respectively. Therefore, the proposed method performs very well in terms of both precision and speed and can effectively improve the accuracy of lumbar image segmentation and the effect of surgical path planning.