Automated Lumbar Spine Diagnosis

Lower back pain (LBP) is the second most common neurological ailment in the United States after the headache according to the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke. Over 11 million Americans have some sort of Intervertebral Disc Disease (IDD) costing over $50 billion annually for related diagnosis and rehabilitation of the patients. In this book, we propose a computer-aided diagnosis system for lumbar spine. our CAD system utilizes a set of machine learning-based solutions for diagnosis of lumbar inter-vertebral disc degenerative diseases (IDD). We study clinical MRI from our collaborating radiologists group and use their clinical diagnosis reports as our gold standard for diagnosis of each disc level in the lumbar area.