Attention-based Shape-Deformation Networks for Artifact-Free Geometry Reconstruction of Lumbar Spine from MR Images
<|reference_start|>Attention-based Shape-Deformation Networks for Artifact-Free Geometry Reconstruction of Lumbar Spine from MR Images: Lumbar disc degeneration, a progressive structural wear and tear of lumbar intervertebral disc, is regarded as an essential role on low back pain, a significant global health concern. Automated lumbar spine geometry reconstruction from MR images will enable fast measurement of medical parameters to evaluate the lumbar status, in order to determine a suitable treatment. Existing image segmentation-based techniques often generate erroneous segments or unstructured point clouds, unsuitable for medical parameter measurement. In this work, we present $\textit{UNet-DeformSA}$ and $\textit{TransDeformer}$: novel attention-based deep neural networks that reconstruct the geometry of the lumbar spine with high spatial accuracy and mesh correspondence across patients, and we also present a variant of $\textit{TransDeformer}$ for error estimation. Specially, we devise new attention modules with a new attention formula, which integrate image features and tokenized contour features to predict the displacements of the points on a shape template without the need for image segmentation. The deformed template reveals the lumbar spine geometry in an image. Experiment results show that our networks generate artifact-free geometry outputs, and the variant of $\textit{TransDeformer}$ can predict the errors of a reconstructed geometry. Our code is available at https://github.com/linchenq/TransDeformer-Mesh.<|reference_end|>
@article{qian2024attention-based,
    title={Attention-based Shape-Deformation Networks for Artifact-Free Geometry
  Reconstruction of Lumbar Spine from MR Images},
    author={Linchen Qian, Jiasong Chen, Linhai Ma, Timur Urakov, Weiyong Gu, Liang
  Liang},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.00231},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2404.00231},
    primaryClass={cs.CV cs.AI cs.LG}
}