Detecting the Disc Herniation in Segmented Lumbar Spine MR Image Using Centroid Distance Function

Abstract

Disc herniation is considered as the main cause for lower back pain (LBP), a health issue that affects a very high proportion of the UK population and is costing the UK government over £1.3 million per day in health care cost. Currently, the process to diagnose the cause of LBP involves a visual examination of a large number of Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI) but this process is both expensive in terms time and effort. Automatic detection of the lumbar disc herniation will reduce the time to diagnose and detect the cause of LBP by the orthopedist. There has been very limited progress towards automatic detection of disc herniation and all of the proposed techniques still require substantial manual intervention in many of the stages. Our analysis of the problem suggests that using the axial view of the MRI could potentially improve the outcome as opposed to the sagittal view used by these techniques. In this paper, we propose using the Centroid Distance Function as a shape feature of a segmented disc MRI taken from the axial view. Visual observation of the feature indicates that the feature could be used as a suitable indicator of the presence of herniation in the lumbar disc.