Faculty Publications
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://idr.nitk.ac.in/handle/123456789/18736
Publications by NITK Faculty
Browse
Search Results
Item CAEB7-UNet: An Attention-Based Deep Learning Framework for Automated Segmentation of C-Spine Vertebrae in CT Images(Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., 2025) Pandey, A.K.; Senapati, K.; Pateel, G.P.Accurate segmentation of vertebrae in computed tomography (CT) images possess serious challenges due to the irregular vertebral boundaries, low contrast and brightness, and noise in CT scans. This study presents a novel channel attention-based EfficientNetB7-UNet (CAEB7-UNet) method to address this complex task effectively. The proposed model introduces an upgraded ReLU-based channel attention module (CAM) in the skip connection which restrains the nonessential attributes by suppressing them and accentuates the relevant features by emphasizing them to boost the overall segmentation performance. In this work, an improved EfficientNetB7 is employed as the encoder for feature extraction, the fusion of local and global features is enhanced through the upgraded CAM in skip connection, and the up-sampling is performed in the decoder. Further, the model is optimized by incorporating hyperparameter optimization, specifically, hybrid learning rate scheduler strategies, along with the AdamW optimizer and custom data augmentation. A total of 34,782 CT images obtained from the RSNA-2022 cervical spine fracture detection challenge is utilized in this study. The proposed model achieves outstanding performance, yielding a dice score index (DSI) of 96.14% and mean intersection over union (mIoU) of 91.46%. Moreover, a comparative performance analysis of CAEB7-UNet with two state-of-the-art models is carried out on the same dataset. Our approach outperforms both the models, with the best one by 8.1%, 6.73%, 12.7%, and 11.98% in terms of DSI, mIoU, precision, and F1-score respectively. Additionally, it requires merely 0.38 seconds to generate the segmentation mask of a single slice of a CT scan. © 2013 IEEE.Item Improving Vertebral Fracture Detection in C-Spine CT Images Using Bayesian Probability-Based Ensemble Learning(Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI), 2025) Pandey, A.K.; Senapati, K.; Argyros, I.K.; Pateel, G.P.Vertebral fracture (VF) may induce spinal cord injury that can lead to serious consequences which eventually may paralyze the entire or some parts of the body depending on the location and severity of the injury. Diagnosis of VFs is crucial at the initial stage, which may be challenging because of the subtle features, noise, and homogeneity present in the computed tomography (CT) images. In this study, Wide ResNet-40, DenseNet-121, and EfficientNet-B7 are chosen, fine-tuned, and used as base models, and a Bayesian-based probabilistic ensemble learning method is proposed for fracture detection in cervical spine CT images. The proposed method considers the prediction’s uncertainty of the base models and combines the predictions obtained from them, to improve the overall performance significantly. This method assigns weights to the base learners, based on their performance and confidence about the prediction. To increase the robustness of the proposed model, custom data augmentation techniques are performed in the preprocessing step. This work utilizes 15,123 CT images from the RSNA-2022 C-spine fracture detection challenge and demonstrates superior performance compared to the individual base learners, and the other existing conventional ensemble methods. The proposed model also outperforms the best state-of-the-art (SOTA) model by 1.62%, 0.51%, and 1.29% in terms of accuracy, specificity, and sensitivity, respectively; furthermore, the AUC score of the best SOTA model is lagging by 5%. The overall accuracy, specificity, sensitivity, and F1-score of the proposed model are 94.62%, 93.51%, 95.29%, and 93.16%, respectively. © 2025 by the authors.