Development of Local Software for Automatic Measurement of Geometric Parameters in the Proximal Femur Using a Combination of a Deep Learning Approach and an Active Shape Model on X-ray Images

Overview

Journal J Imaging Inform Med

Publisher Springer Nature

Specialty Radiology

Date 2024 Feb 12

PMID 38343246

Authors

Hamid Alavi

Mehdi Seifi

Mahboubeh Rouhollahei

Mehravar Rafati

Masoud Arabfard

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Proximal femur geometry is an important risk factor for diagnosing and predicting hip and femur injuries. Hence, the development of an automated approach for measuring these parameters could help physicians with the early identification of hip and femur ailments. This paper presents a technique that combines the active shape model (ASM) and deep learning methodologies. First, the femur boundary is extracted by a deep learning neural network. Then, the femur's anatomical landmarks are fitted to the extracted border using the ASM method. Finally, the geometric parameters of the proximal femur, including femur neck axis length (FNAL), femur head diameter (FHD), femur neck width (FNW), shaft width (SW), neck shaft angle (NSA), and alpha angle (AA), are calculated by measuring the distances and angles between the landmarks. The dataset of hip radiographic images consisted of 428 images, with 208 men and 220 women. These images were split into training and testing sets for analysis. The deep learning network and ASM were subsequently trained on the training dataset. In the testing dataset, the automatic measurement of FNAL, FHD, FNW, SW, NSA, and AA parameters resulted in mean errors of 1.19%, 1.46%, 2.28%, 2.43%, 1.95%, and 4.53%, respectively.

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