A Dual-Feature Extractor Framework for Accurate Back Depth and Spine Morphology Estimation from Monocular RGB Images

Scoliosis is a prevalent condition that impacts both physical health and appearance, with adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS) being the most common form. Currently, the main AIS assessment tool, X-rays, poses significant limitations, including radiation exposure and limited accessibility in poor and remote areas. To address this problem, the current solutions are using RGB images to analyze spine morphology. However, RGB images are highly susceptible to environmental factors, such as lighting conditions, compromising model stability and generalizability. Therefore, in this study, we propose a novel pipeline to accurately estimate the depth information of the unclothed back, compensating for the limitations of 2D information and then estimate spine morphology by integrating both depth and surface information. To capture the subtle depth variations of the back surface with precision, we design an adaptive multiscale feature learning network, named Grid-Aware Multiscale Adaptive Network (GAMA-Net). This model uses dual encoders to extract both patch-level and global features, which are then interacted by the Patch-Based Hybrid Attention (PBHA) module. The Adaptive Multiscale Feature Fusion (AMFF) module is used to dynamically fuse information in the decoder. As a result, our depth estimation model achieves remarkable accuracy across three different evaluation metrics, with scores of nearly 78.2%, 93.6%, and 97.5%, respectively. To further validate the effectiveness of the predicted depth, we integrate both surface and depth information for spine morphology estimation. This integrated approach enhances the accuracy of spine curve generation, achieving an impressive performance of up to 97%.Clinical Relevance-Our approach integrates a novel depth estimation model with RGB images to provide comprehensive and accurate spine morphology analysis.