Detection of Phalange Region Based on U-Net

Osteoporosis is one of the famous bone diseases. It is a major cause of deteriorating the quality of life, and early detection and early treatment are becoming socially important. Visual screening using Computed Radiography (CR) images is effective for diagnosis of osteoporosis, but there are problems of increasing the burden on doctors, variation in diagnostic results due to differences in experiences of doctors, and undetected lesions. In order to solve this problem, we are working on a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system for osteoporosis. In this paper, we propose segmentation methods of the phalange region from the phalangeal CR images as a preprocessing of classification of osteoporosis. In the proposed method, we construct a segmentation model using U-Net, which is a type of deep convolution neural network (DCNN). The proposed method was applied to input images generated from CR images of 101 patients with both hands, and evaluated using the Intersection over Union (IoU) values. The result was 0.914 in IoU.