# Disc-Centric Contrastive Learning for Lumbar Spine Severity Grading

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05738 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05738/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.11362/) (2020)
- [3D U-Net: Learning Dense Volumetric Segmentation from Sparse Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.06650/) (2016)
- [Learning a Variational Network for Reconstruction of Accelerated MRI Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.00447/) (2017)
- [Contrastive learning of global and local features for medical image segmentation with limited annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.10511/) (2020)
- [The RSNA Lumbar Degenerative Imaging Spine Classification (LumbarDISC) Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09162/) (2025)
- [CL-MRI: Self-Supervised Contrastive Learning to Improve the Accuracy of Undersampled MRI Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00530/) (2023)
- [AI-Driven MRI Spine Pathology Detection: A Comprehensive Deep Learning Approach for Automated Diagnosis in Diverse Clinical Settings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20316/) (2025)
- [Revolutionizing Precise Low Back Pain Diagnosis via Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20813/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work examines a disc-centric approach for automated severity grading of lumbar spinal stenosis from sagittal T2-weighted MRI. The method combines contrastive pretraining with disc-level fine-tuning, using a single anatomically localized region of interest per intervertebral disc. Contrastive learning is employed to help the model focus on meaningful disc features and reduce sensitivity to irrelevant differences in image appearance. The framework includes an auxiliary regression task for disc localization and applies weighted focal loss to address class imbalance. Experiments demonstrate a 78.1% balanced accuracy and a reduced severe-to-normal misclassification rate of 2.13% compared with supervised training from scratch. Detecting discs with moderate severity can still be challenging, but focusing on disc-level features provides a practical way to assess the lumbar spinal stenosis.