Semi-automatic segmentation and quantification of 3D spinal cord data

Robert Van Uitert; Ingmar Bitter; John A. Butman M.D.

doi:10.1117/12.653266

13 March 2006 Semi-automatic segmentation and quantification of 3D spinal cord data

Robert Van Uitert, Ingmar Bitter, John A. Butman M.D.

Proceedings Volume 6143, Medical Imaging 2006: Physiology, Function, and Structure from Medical Images; 61430S (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.653266
Event: Medical Imaging, 2006, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Delineation of objects within medical images is often difficult to perform reproducibly when one relies upon hand-segmentation. To avoid inter- and intra-user variability, a semi-automatic segmentation method can more accurately and consistently determine the object boundaries. This paper presents a semi-automatic process for determining the length and volume of the spinal cord between adjacent pairs of intervertebral discs and the total length and volume of the spinal cord. A level set segmentation was performed on MRI data with user selected landmarks in order to obtain a segmentation of the spinal cord. The length and volume measurements were performed on 20 segments from C1 to L1 with five sets of user selected landmarks. Our results show that the average spinal cord segment length was 21.55 mm with a standard deviation of 25.11% and the average spinal cord segment volume was 2,217.16 mm³ with a standard deviation of 80.51%. The measurement variability of a single anatomical length across multiple trials of different sets of seed points was three orders of magnitude lower (0.06%) than the variability across different anatomical lengths (25.23%), while the measurement variability of a single anatomical volume across multiple trials of different sets of seed points was two orders of magnitude lower (0.37%) than the variability across different anatomical volumes (79.24%). Our method has been demonstrated to be potentially insensitive to intra- and inter-user variability.

Citation Download Citation

Robert Van Uitert, Ingmar Bitter, and John A. Butman M.D. "Semi-automatic segmentation and quantification of 3D spinal cord data", Proc. SPIE 6143, Medical Imaging 2006: Physiology, Function, and Structure from Medical Images, 61430S (13 March 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.653266

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