The purpose of this study is to develop an automated algorithm for thoracic vertebral segmentation on chest radiography using deep learning. 124 de-identified lateral chest radiographs on unique patients were obtained. Segmentations of visible vertebrae were manually performed by a medical student and verified by a board-certified radiologist. 74 images were used for training, 10 for validation, and 40 were held out for testing. A U-Net deep convolutional neural network was employed for segmentation, using the sum of dice coefficient and binary cross-entropy as the loss function. On the test set, the algorithm demonstrated an average dice coefficient value of 90.5 and an average intersection-over-union (IoU) of 81.75. Deep learning demonstrates promise in the segmentation of vertebrae on lateral chest radiography.
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