Automated vertebral body image segmentation for medical screening

摘要

A method is disclosed for fully automated segmentation of human vertebral body images in a CT (computerized tomography) study with no user interaction and no phantoms, which has resiliency to anatomical abnormalities, and protocol and scanner variations. The method was developed to enable automated detection of osteoporosis in CT studies performed for other clinical reasons. Testing with 1,044 abdominal CTs from multiple sites, resulted in detection of 96.3% of the vertebral bodies and 1% false positives. Of the detected vertebral bodies, 83.3% were segmented adequately for sagittal plane quantitative evaluation of vertebral fractures indicative of osteoporosis. Improved results were observed when selecting the best sagittal plane of 3 for each vertebra, yielding a segmentation success rate of 85.4%. The method is preferably implemented in software as a building block in a system for automated osteoporosis detection.

主权项

1. A method performed in a computer system comprising the steps of:
receiving as an input a digital representation of an image of a volume region of a patient's body containing the spine; using at least one of statistical and heuristic computational techniques on the digital representation, isolating the spine from the surrounding volume, and in the spine, segmenting the vertebral body trabecular bones, the vertebral body cortexes, and the intervertebral discs, and locating the planes of the intervertebral discs; wherein segmenting the intervertebral discs includes steps (i) and (ii):
(i) positioning a rectangular parametric curve along the expected center of a vertebral body; and(ii) inspecting a cross section of the parametric curve; and creating a graph of weight as a function of position along the spine; and generating a map corresponding to the volume containing plural elements wherein each element is identified as background or as part of a specified part of the spine.