Cervical vertebral corner detection using haar-like features and modified hough forest

The neck (cervical spine) is a flexible part of the human body and is particularly vulnerable to injury. Patients suspected of cervical spine injuries are often imaged using lateral view radiographs. Incorrect diagnosis based on these images may lead to serious long-term consequences. Our overarching goal is to develop a computer-aided detection system to help an emergency room physician correctly diagnose a patient's injury. In this paper, we present a method to localize the corners of cervical vertebrae in a set of 90 lateral cervical radiographs. Haar-like features are computed using intensity and gradient image patches, each of which votes for possible corner position using a modified Hough forest regression technique. Votes are aggregated using two dimensional kernel density estimation, to find the location of the corner. Our method demonstrates promising results, identifying corners with an average median error of 2.08 mm.