Society of Photo-optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE)
Abstract
In this paper an algorithm to carry out the automatic segmentation of bone structures in 3D CT images
has been implemented. Automatic segmentation of bone structures is of special interest for radiologists and
surgeons to analyze bone diseases or to plan some surgical interventions. This task is very complicated as bones
usually present intensities overlapping with those of surrounding tissues. This overlapping is mainly due to the
composition of bones and to the presence of some diseases such as Osteoarthritis, Osteoporosis, etc. Moreover,
segmentation of bone structures is a very time-consuming task due to the 3D essence of the bones. Usually,
this segmentation is implemented manually or with algorithms using simple techniques such as thresholding and
thus providing bad results. In this paper gray information and 3D statistical information have been combined
to be used as input to a continuous max-
ow algorithm. Twenty CT images have been tested and di erent
coe cients have been computed to assess the performance of our implementation. Dice and Sensitivity values
above 0.91 and 0.97 respectively were obtained. A comparison with Level Sets and thresholding techniques has
been carried out and our results outperformed them in terms of accuracy.Ministerio de ciencia e innovación TEC2010-21619-C04-02Junta de Andalucía P11-TIC-772