1 research outputs found
MRI-based Surgical Planning for Lumbar Spinal Stenosis
The most common reason for spinal surgery in elderly patients is lumbar
spinal stenosis(LSS). For LSS, treatment decisions based on clinical and
radiological information as well as personal experience of the surgeon shows
large variance. Thus a standardized support system is of high value for a more
objective and reproducible decision. In this work, we develop an automated
algorithm to localize the stenosis causing the symptoms of the patient in
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). With 22 MRI features of each of five spinal
levels of 321 patients, we show it is possible to predict the location of
lesion triggering the symptoms. To support this hypothesis, we conduct an
automated analysis of labeled and unlabeled MRI scans extracted from 788
patients. We confirm quantitatively the importance of radiological information
and provide an algorithmic pipeline for working with raw MRI scans