Proceedings Article | 15 March 2011
Proc. SPIE. 7962, Medical Imaging 2011: Image Processing
KEYWORDS: Target detection, Minerals, Magnesium, Medicine, Bone, Medical imaging, Computed tomography, Computer aided design, Radiology, Spine
For gaining a better understanding of bone quality, a great deal of attention has been paid to vertebral geometry in
anatomy. The aim of this study was to design a decision support scheme for vertebral geometries. The proposed scheme
consists of four parts: (1) automated extraction of bone, (2) generation of median plane image of spine, (3) detection of
vertebrae, (4) quantification of vertebral body width, depth, cross-sectional area (CSA), and trabecular bone mineral
density (BMD). The proposed scheme was applied to 10 CT cases and compared with manual tracking performed by an
anatomy expert. Mean differences in the width, depth, CSA, and trabecular BMD were 3.1 mm, 1.4 mm, 88.7 mm2, and
7.3 mg/cm3, respectively. We found moderate or high correlations in vertebral geometry between our scheme and
manual tracking (r > 0.72). In contrast, measurements obtained by using our scheme were slightly smaller than those
acquired from manual tracking. However, the outputs of the proposed scheme in most CT cases were regarded to be
appropriate on the basis of the subjective assessment of an anatomy expert. Therefore, if the appropriate outputs from the
proposed scheme are selected in advance by an anatomy expert, the results can potentially be used for an analysis of
vertebral body geometries.
