SpineFM: Leveraging Foundation Models for Automatic Spine X-ray Segmentation

This paper introduces SpineFM, a novel pipeline that achieves state-of-the-art performance in the automatic segmentation and identification of vertebral bodies in cervical and lumbar spine radiographs. SpineFM leverages the regular geometry of the spine, employing a novel inductive process to sequentially infer the location of each vertebra along the spinal column. Vertebrae are segmented using Medical-SAM-Adaptor, a robust foundation model that diverges from commonly used CNN-based models. We achieved outstanding results on two publicly available spine X-Ray datasets, with successful identification of 97.8% and 99.6% of annotated vertebrae, respectively. Of which, our segmentation reached an average Dice of 0.942 and 0.921, surpassing previous state-of-the-art methods.