Introduction:
Scoliosis is a three-dimensional deformation of the spine that is a deformity induced by physical or disease related causes as the spine is rotated abnormally. Early detection has a significant influence on the possibility of nonsurgical treatment.
Material and Methods:
To train a deep learning model with preprocessed images and to evaluate the results with and without data augmentation to enable the diagnosis of scoliosis based only on a chest X-ray image. The preprocessed images in which only the spine, rib contours, and some hard tissues were left from the original chest image, were used for learning along with the original images, and three CNN(Convolutional Neural Networks) models (VGG16, ResNet152, and EfficientNet) were selected to proceed with training.
Results:
The results obtained by training with the preprocessed images showed a superior accuracy to those obtained by training with the original image. When the scoliosis image was added through data augmentation, the accuracy was further improved, ultimately achieving a classification accuracy of 93.56% with the ResNet152 model using test data.
Discussion:
Through supplementation with future research, the method proposed herein is expected to allow the early diagnosis of scoliosis as well as cost reduction by reducing the burden of additional radiographic imaging for disease detection.