Multi-View Computed Tomography Network for Osteoporosis Classification

Osteoporosis is a skeletal disease that is difficult to identify in advance of symptoms. Existing skeletal disease screening methods, such as dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, are only used for specific purpose due to cost and safety reasons once symptoms develop. Early detection of osteopenia and osteoporosis using other modalities for relatively frequent examinations is helpful in terms of early treatment and cost. Recently, many studies have proposed deep learning-based osteoporosis diagnosis methods for various modalities and achieved outstanding results. However, these studies have limitations in clinical use because they require tedious processes, such as manually cropping a region of interest or diagnosing osteoporosis rather than osteopenia. In this study, we present a classification task for diagnosing osteopenia and osteoporosis using computed tomography (CT). Additionally, we propose a multi-view CT network (MVCTNet) that automatically classifies osteopenia and osteoporosis using two images from the original CT image. Unlike previous methods that use a single CT image as input, the MVCTNet captures various features from the images generated by our multi-view settings. The MVCTNet comprises two feature extractors and three task layers. Two feature extractors use the images as separate inputs and learn different features through dissimilarity loss. The target layers learn the target task through the features of the two feature extractors and then aggregate them. For the experiments, we use a dataset containing 2,883 patients’ CT images labeled as normal, osteopenia, and osteoporosis. Additionally, we observe that the proposed method improves the performance of all experiments based on the quantitative and qualitative evaluations.