Automatic Lumbar Vertebrae Registration Using the Hough Transform in Digital Videofluoroscopy

Zheng, Yalin, Nixon, Mark S and Allen, Robert (2001) Automatic Lumbar Vertebrae Registration Using the Hough Transform in Digital Videofluoroscopy. 7th Annual Scientific Conference of the Institute of Physics and Engineering in Medicine.

Abstract

Low back pain is a significant problem in the industrialised world and its associated cost is enormous. Diagnosis of the underlying causes can be extremely difficult. Since mechanical factors often play an important role, it can be helpful in studying the motion of the spine. Traditional radiographic methods of obtaining spine images suffer from high radiation dosage and can only yield a limited number of images. Thus, digital videofluoroscopy was introduced. This can provide sequences with many image frames, but the images obtained often suffer due to noise and very low radiation dosage. Thus determining vertebrae position within the image sequence presents a considerable challenge. There have been many studies aimed at vertebral image extraction, varying from manually locating the vertebral landmarks to template matching. However, the former method poses problems of repeatability that can cause errors in kinematic analysis, while the latter cannot cope with occlusion and out-of-plane motion. In this paper, we show how the Hough transform can be used to solve this problem. Here, Fourier descriptors were used to describe the vertebral body shape and were incorporated within our Hough transform algorithm from which we can obtain affine transform parameters, i.e. scale, rotation and center position. The method has been applied to images of a calibration model and to images from a sequence of a moving human lumbar spine. The results show promise and potential for object extraction from poor quality images and that models of spinal movement can indeed be derived for clinical application.

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Contributors

Author: Mark S Nixon

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