Improving an active shape model with random classification forest for segmentation of cervical vertebrae

Abstract

X-ray is a common modality for diagnosing cervical vertebrae injuries. Many injuries are missed by emergency physicians which later causes life threatening complications. Computer aided analysis of X-ray images has the potential to detect missed injuries. Segmentation of the vertebrae is a crucial step towards automatic injury detection system. Active shape model (ASM) is one of the most successful and popular method for vertebrae segmentation. In this work, we propose a new ASM search method based on random classification forest and a kernel density estimation-based prediction technique. The proposed method have been tested on a dataset of 90 emergency room X-ray images containing 450 vertebrae and outperformed the classical Mahalanobis distancebased ASM search and also the regression forest-based method.