Abstract
Spondyloarthritis (SpA) is a group of inflammatory diseases that cause severe damage in the structure of the skeleton. One of the most important features that are assessed in the diagnosis of SpA disorders and during the monitoring of the progression of this disease is the shape of the vertebrae and the appearance of bony outgrowths in the spine region. For this purpose, radiography is often used. This paper presents a novel automated method of external contour segmentation of vertebrae in X-ray images. The proposed algorithm consists of preprocessing, edge detection using the Sobel operator, binarization, area opening, and skeletonization. During the study, the impact of different filters (i.e., Gaussian filter, sigma filter, and anisotropic diffusion filter) on the quality of the results was also investigated. The method’s efficiency was tested on a dataset containing 11 lateral cervical spine radiographs. The results show that the method has the potential to become an automatic tool used by physicians to determine the shape of vertebrae.
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Schneider, Z., Pociask, E. (2022). Automated External Contour-Segmentation Method for Vertebrae in Lateral Cervical Spine Radiographs. In: Piaseczna, N., Gorczowska, M., Łach, A. (eds) Innovations and Developments of Technologies in Medicine, Biology and Healthcare. EMBS ICS 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1360. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88976-0_16
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