Segmenting lumbar vertebrae in digital video fluoroscopic images through edge enhancement

Video fluoroscopy provides a cost effective way for the diagnosis of low back pain. Backbones or vertebrae are usually segmented manually from fluoroscopic images of low quality during such a diagnosis. In this paper, we try to reduce human workload by performing automatic vertebrae detection and segmentation. Operators need to provide the rough location of landmarks only. The proposed algorithm would perform edge detection, which is based on pattern recognition of texture, along the snake formed from the landmarks. The snake would then attach to the edge detected. Experimental results show that the proposed system can segment vertebrae from video fluoroscopic image automatically and accurately.