Abstract
Lumbar spine magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a critical diagnostic tool for the assessment of various spinal pathologies, including degenerative disc disease, spinal stenosis, and spondylolisthesis. The accurate identification and quantification of the dural sack cross-sectional area are essential for the evaluation of these conditions. Current manual measurement methods are time-consuming and prone to inter-observer variability. Our study developed and validated deep learning models, specifically U-Net, Attention U-Net, and MultiResUNet, for the automated detection and measurement of the dural sack area in lumbar spine MRI, using a dataset of 515 patients with symptomatic back pain and externally validating the results based on 50 patient scans. The U-Net model achieved an accuracy of 0.9990 and 0.9987 on the initial and external validation datasets, respectively. The Attention U-Net model reported an accuracy of 0.9992 and 0.9989, while the MultiResUNet model displayed a remarkable accuracy of 0.9996 and 0.9995, respectively. All models showed promising precision, recall, and F1-score metrics, along with reduced mean absolute errors compared to the ground truth manual method. In conclusion, our study demonstrates the potential of these deep learning models for the automated detection and measurement of the dural sack cross-sectional area in lumbar spine MRI. The proposed models achieve high-performance metrics in both the initial and external validation datasets, indicating their potential utility as valuable clinical tools for the evaluation of lumbar spine pathologies. Future studies with larger sample sizes and multicenter data are warranted to validate the generalizability of the model further and to explore the potential integration of this approach into routine clinical practice.