Atlas-based registration for accurate segmentation of thoracic and lumbar vertebrae in CT data

Abstract

Segmentation of the vertebrae in the spine is of relevance to many medical applications related to the spine. This paper describes a method based upon atlasbased registration for achieving an accurate segmentation of the thoracic and the lumbar vertebrae in the spine as imaged by computed tomography. The method has been evaluated on ten data sets provided as a part of the segmentation challenge hosted by the 2nd MICCAI workshop on Computational Methods and Clinical Applications for Spine Imaging. An average point-to-surface error of 1.05 ± 0.65mm and a mean DICE coefficient of 0.94 ± 0.03 were obtained when comparing the computed segmentations with ground truth segmentations. These results are highly competitive when compared to the results of earlier presented methods.