mSegResRF-SPECT: A Novel Joint Classification Model of Whole Body Bone Scan Images for Bone Metastasis Diagnosis.

Background: Whole-body bone scanning is a nuclear medicine technique with high sensitivity used for the diagnosis of bone-related diseases [e.g., bone metastases] that can be obtained by positron emission tomography[PET] or single-photon emission computed tomography[SPECT] imaging, depending on the different radiopharmaceuticals used. In contrast to the high sensitivity of the bone scan, it has low specificity, which leads to misinterpretation, causing adverse effects of unwarranted intervention or interruption to timely treatment.

Objective: To address this problem, this paper proposes a joint model called mSegResRF-SPECT, which accomplishes for the first time the task of classifying whole-body bone scan images on a public SPECT dataset [BS-80K] for the diagnosis of bone metastases.

Methods: The mSegResRF-SPECT adopts a multi-bone region segmentation algorithm to segment the whole body image into 13 regions, ResNet34 as an extractor to extract the regional features, and a random forest algorithm as a classifier.

Results: The experimental results of the proposed model show that the average accuracy, sensitivity, and F1 score of the model on the BS-80K dataset reached SOTA.

Conclusion: The proposed method presents a promising solution for better bone scan classification methods.