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Subtracting–adding strategy for necrotic lesion segmentation in osteonecrosis of the femoral head

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Abstract

Purpose

Osteonecrosis of the femoral head (ONFH) is a severe bone disease that can progressively lead to hip dysfunction. Accurately segmenting the necrotic lesion helps in diagnosing and treating ONFH. This paper aims at enhancing deep learning models for necrosis segmentation.

Methods

Necrotic lesions of ONFH are confined to the femoral head. Considering this domain knowledge, we introduce a preprocessing procedure, termed the “subtracting–adding” strategy, which explicitly incorporates this domain knowledge into the downstream deep neural network input. This strategy first removes the voxels outside the predefined volume of interest to “subtract” irrelevant information, and then it concatenates the bone mask with raw data to “add” anatomical structure information.

Results

Each of the tested off-the-shelf networks performed better with the help of the “subtracting–adding” strategy. The dice similarity coefficients increased by 10.93%, 9.23%, 9.38% and 1.60% for FCN, HRNet, SegNet and UNet, respectively. The improvements in FCN and HRNet were statistically significant.

Conclusions

The “subtracting–adding” strategy enhances the performance of general-purpose networks in necrotic lesion segmentation. This strategy is compatible with various semantic segmentation networks, alleviating the need to design task-specific models.

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Acknowledgements

The computations in this paper were run on the Siyuan Mark-I cluster supported by the Center for High Performance Computing (HPC) at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Mr. Colin McClean is acknowledged for his assistance with editing this manuscript. This work is supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant Number: AF0820060).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Jiping Zhang, Sijia Guo & Cheng-Kung Cheng

  2. Shanghai Ninth People’s Hospital, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Degang Yu

  3. Engineering Research Center for Digital Medicine of the Ministry of Education, Shanghai, 200030, China

    Cheng-Kung Cheng

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  1. Jiping Zhang
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  2. Sijia Guo
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Correspondence to Degang Yu or Cheng-Kung Cheng.

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Zhang, J., Guo, S., Yu, D. et al. Subtracting–adding strategy for necrotic lesion segmentation in osteonecrosis of the femoral head. Int J CARS 19, 961–970 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11548-024-03073-7

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