Anterior Osteophyte Identification in Cervical Vertebrae

Abstract

Radiologist always examines X-ray to determine abnormal changes in cervical, lumbar & thoracic vertebrae. Osteophyte (bony growth) may appear at the corners of vertebrae so that vertebral shape becomes abnormal. This paper presents the idea from Image processing techniques such as customised Hough transform which will be used for segmentation which should be independent of rotation, scale, noise & shape. This segmented image will be then used for computing size invariant, convex hull based features to differentiate normal cervical vertebrae from cervical vertebrae containing anterior osteophyte. This approach effectively finds anterior osteophytes in cervical vertebrae.