Deep learning ensemble for abdominal aortic calcification scoring from lumbar spine X-ray and DXA images

Abdominal aortic calcification (AAC) is an independent predictor of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). AAC is typically detected as an incidental finding in spine scans. Early detection of AAC through opportunistic screening using any available imaging modalities could help identify individuals with a higher risk of developing clinical CVDs. However, AAC is not routinely assessed in clinics, and manual scoring from projection images is time-consuming and prone to inter-rater variability. Also, automated AAC scoring methods exist, but earlier methods have not accounted for the inherent variability in AAC scoring and were developed for a single imaging modality at a time.

We propose an automated method for quantifying AAC from lumbar spine X-ray and Dual-energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DXA) images using an ensemble of convolutional neural network models that predicts a distribution of probable AAC scores. We treat AAC score as a normally distributed random variable to account for the variability of manual scoring. The mean and variance of the assumed normal AAC distributions are estimated based on manual annotations, and the models in the ensemble are trained by simulating AAC scores from these distributions. Our proposed ensemble approach successfully extracted AAC scores from both X-ray and DXA images with predicted score distributions demonstrating strong agreement with manual annotations, as evidenced by concordance correlation coefficients of 0.930 for X-ray and 0.912 for DXA. The prediction error between the average estimates of our approach and the average manual annotations was lower than the errors reported previously, highlighting the benefit of incorporating uncertainty in AAC scoring.