Back Shape Measurement and Three-Dimensional Reconstruction of Spinal Shape Using One Kinect Sensor

Spinal screening relies mainly on direct clinical diagnosis or X-ray examination (which generates harmful radioactive exposure to human body). In general, the lack of knowledge in this area will prevent parents to discover adolescents' spinal deformation problems at children's early age. Therefore, we propose a low-cost, easy to use, radiation free and high accuracy method to quickly reconstruct the three-dimensional shape of the spine, which can be used to evaluation of spinal deformation. Firstly, the depth images collected by Kinect sensor are transformed into three-dimensional point clouds. Then, the features of anatomic landmark points and spinous processes (SP) line are classified and extracted. Finally, the correlation model of SP line and spine midline is established to reconstruct the spine. The results show that the proposed method can extract anatomic landmark points and evaluate scoliosis accurately (average RMS error of 5 mm and 3 degree), which is feasible and promising.