Atlas-based segmentation of the thoracic and lumbar vertebrae

Abstract

Segmentation of the vertebrae in the spine is of relevance to many medical applications. To this end, the 2nd MICCAIworkshop on Computational Methods and Clinical Applications for Spine Imaging organized a segmentation challenge. This paper briefly presents one of the participating methods along with achieved results. The employed method is based upon atlas-based segmentation, where a number of atlases of the spine are registered to the target data set. The labels of the deformed atlases are combined using label fusion to obtain the final segmentation of the target data set. An average DICE score of 0.94 ± 0.03 was achieved on the training data set.