Improving radiologists’ and orthopedists’ QoE in diagnosing lumbar disk herniation using 3D modeling

Abstract

This article studies and analyzes the use of 3D models, built from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) axial scans of the lumbar intervertebral disk, that are needed for the diagnosis of disk herniation. We study the possibility of assisting radiologists and orthopedists and increasing their quality of experience (QoE) during the diagnosis process. The main aim is to build a 3D model for the desired area of interest and ask the specialists to consider the 3D models in the diagnosis process instead of considering multiple axial MRI scans. We further propose an automated framework to diagnose the lumber disk herniation using the constructed 3D models. We evaluate the effectiveness of increasing the specialists QoE by conducting a questionnaire on 14 specialists with different experiences ranging from residents to consultants. We then evaluate the effectiveness of the automated diagnosis framework by training it with a set of 83 cases and then testing it on an unseen test set. The results show that the the use of 3D models increases doctors QoE and the automated framework gets 90% of diagnosis accuracy.