Title
Automated extraction method for the center line of spinal canal and its application to the spinal curvature quantification in torso X-ray CT images
Abstract
X-ray CT images have been widely used in clinical routine in recent years. CT images scanned by a modern CT scanner can show the details of various organs and tissues. This means various organs and tissues can be simultaneously interpreted on CT images. However, CT image interpretation requires a lot of time and energy. Therefore, support for interpreting CT images based on image-processing techniques is expected. The interpretation of the spinal curvature is important for clinicians because spinal curvature is associated with various spinal disorders. We propose a quantification scheme of the spinal curvature based on the center line of spinal canal on CT images. The proposed scheme consists of four steps: (1) Automated extraction of the skeletal region based on CT number thresholding. (2) Automated extraction of the center line of spinal canal. (3) Generation of the median plane image of spine, which is reformatted based on the spinal canal. (4) Quantification of the spinal curvature. The proposed scheme was applied to 10 cases, and compared with the Cobb angle that is commonly used by clinicians. We found that a high-correlation (for the 95% confidence interval, lumbar lordosis: 0.81-0.99) between values obtained by the proposed (vector) method and Cobb angle. Also, the proposed method can provide the reproducible result (inter- and intra-observer variability: within 2 degrees). These experimental results suggested a possibility that the proposed method was efficient for quantifying the spinal curvature on CT images.
Year
DOI
Venue
2010
10.1117/12.843956
Proceedings of SPIE
Keywords
Field
DocType
X-ray CT images,Spinal curvature,Spinal canal,Cobb method,Median plane image of spine
Biomedical engineering,Torso,Computer vision,Curvature,Image processing,Cobb angle,Median plane,Scanner,Artificial intelligence,Thresholding,Spinal canal,Physics
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
7623
0277-786X
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
1
10
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
tatsuro hayashi1131.94
X. Zhou211.41
Huayue Chen3418.90
takeshi hara401.01
kei miyamoto501.01
tatsunori kobayashi640.90
Ryujiro Yokoyama712318.40
Masayuki Kanematsu89017.09
Hiroaki Hoshi910618.21
Hiroshi Fujita1011824.65