Bimodal Active Shape Models for Cervical Vertebrae and Spinal Canal Boundary Extraction

Abstract

Cervical spine pathologies often stem from deformations of the intervertebral discs and spinal canal. This work introduces a computational method for boundary extraction of these structures. The proposed method employs an active shape model (ASM) and is bimodal, in the sense that computed tomography (CT) images are used for ASM training and magnetic resonance (MR) images are used for ASM testing. The proposed method is less dependent on large amounts of training samples than deep learning methods, whereas it involves limited user intervention. Still, it is comparable to state-of-the-art methods in terms of segmentation quality, as demonstrated in our experimental comparisons.

Keywords

• active shape models
• spinal cord
• spinal canal
• image segmentation