The QUT Biomechanics & Spine Research Group was well represented at the annual BDHP Research Week for the Children’s Health Research Precinct. Research Fellow Maria Antico gave a presentation, “Deep Learning-based automatic segmentation for reconstructing vertebral anatomy of Healthy Adolescents, and Patients with Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) Using MRI Data”. This world first research project aims to utilize MRI (no ionising radiation exposure) instead of CT scans (ionising radiation exposure) to create 3D skeletal models. Deep learning will automate this process in a matter of minutes, which currently is only achievable with time consuming manual segmentation which takes 10-12 hours per spine.

UQ medical student Fraser Labrom is also enrolled in an M.Phil degree and presented his Masters project, “Understanding Deformity Progression in Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis: Sequential MRI Reveals Vertebral Body Wedging Significantly Contributes to Coronal Plane Deformity during Growth”. Fraser’s project utilizes our unique Sequential MRI of scoliosis dataset to better understand the pathological process of the progression of scoliosis during the adolescent growing years.
Our Queensland Children’s Hospital junior doctor, Dr Catherine Choi presented her QUT M.Phil project, “Thoracic vertebral growth in healthy adolescent females: a sequential MRI study in a Brisbane cohort” which utilizes our unique Sequential MRI of healthy adolescents dataset. Her work analyses the growth of the thoracic vertebrae in adolescent healthy straight spines which will ultimately help our researchers to better understand what is pathological in the growth of our adolescents with scoliosis.