Preliminary study on construction of polar coordinate systems to define the positions of cervical structures in videofluorography during swallowing

In this report, we have proposed a construction method of polar coordinate systems to define the positions of cervical structures in videofluorography (VF) during swallowing. The polar coordinate systems have s and t axes on radial and circumferential directions, respectively, and can be translated and rotated to track cervical spines in VFs. In addition, the t axes can be bent to represent the bending deformation of cervical spines. The parameters of the translation, rotation and bending deformation are obtained by a deformable template matching technique. The accuracy of the proposed coordinate systems was evaluated by use of actual VFs, and several experimental results were shown.