Method, system and uses for determining abdominal aortic calcification

A system for determining abdominal aortic calcification comprising:

• at least one processor that determines a score representing abdominal aortic calcification from a received lateral lumbar image of a patient's abdominal aorta that includes an abdominal aortic section having a plurality of abdominal aortic segments;
• the at least one processor:
• implementing an encoder that identifies visual features in the lateral lumbar image at the abdominal aortic section;
• implementing an anterior decoder to decode the visual features to produce a plurality of anterior calcification scores, each anterior calcification score associated with an anterior portion of one abdominal aortic segment;
• and
• implementing a posterior decoder to decode the visual features to produce a plurality of posterior calcification scores, each posterior calcification score associated with one abdominal aortic segment;
• wherein each of the anterior and posterior decoders is a trained machine learning decoder and the anterior decoder is trained separately to the posterior decoder.

A method of diagnosing a disease, the method comprising:

• receiving a lateral lumbar image that includes an abdominal aortic section of a patient's abdominal aorta, the abdominal aortic section including a plurality of abdominal aortic segments;
• determining a score representing abdominal aortic calcification from the lateral lumbar image using one or more processors, wherein the determining step comprises:
• the one or more processors encoding the lateral lumbar image to identify visual features in the image at the abdominal aortic segments;
• the one or more processors implementing an anterior decoder to decode the visual features to produce a plurality of anterior calcification scores, each anterior calcification score associated with an anterior portion of one abdominal aortic segment;
• the one or more processors implementing a posterior decoder to decode the visual features to produce a plurality of posterior calcification scores, each posterior calcification score associated with an posterior portion of one abdominal aortic segment;
• wherein each of the anterior and posterior decoders is a trained machine learning decoder and the anterior decoder is trained separately to the posterior decoder;
• and
• the method comprising determining a risk category for a disease based on the determined plurality of anterior and posterior calcification scores.