Automatic extraction of cervical vertebrae from ultrasonography with fuzzy ART clustering

Abstract

Cervical vertebrae are important ramus communican that connect human body and the corpus. Muscles around cervical vertebrae such as deep cervical flexor and sternocleidomastoid muscle do key role to control chronicle neck pain thus monitoring such muscles near cervical vertebrae is important. In this paper, we propose a method to detect and analyze cervical vertebrae and related muscles automatically with fuzzy ART clustering from ultrasonography. The experiment verifies that our approach is consistent with human medical experts’ decision to locate key measuring point for muscle analysis and successful in detecting cervical vertebrae accurately.