title: Cervical spine mobility analysis on radiographs: a fully automatic approach.
abstract: Conventional X-ray radiography remains nowadays the most common method to analyze spinal mobility in two dimensions. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to develop a framework dedicated to the fully automatic cervical spine mobility analysis on X-ray images. To this aim, we propose an approach based on three main steps: fully automatic vertebra detection, vertebra segmentation and angular measurement. The accuracy of the method was assessed for a total of 245 vertebræ. For the vertebra detection, we proposed an adapted version of two descriptors, namely Scale-invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) and Speeded-up Robust Features (SURF), coupled with a multi-class Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier. Vertebræ are successfully detected in 89.8% of cases and it is demonstrated that SURF slightly outperforms SIFT. The Active Shape Model approach was considered as a segmentation procedure. We observed that a statistical shape model specific to the vertebral level improves the results. Angular errors of cervical spine mobility are presented. We showed that these errors remain within the inter-operator variability of the reference method.
authors.affiliation: University of Mons, Place du Parc, 20, 7000 Mons, Belgium. Fabian.Lecron@umons.ac.be
authors.forename: Fabian
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Lecron
authors.forename: Mohammed
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Benjelloun
authors.forename: Saïd
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Mahmoudi
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000465:Algorithms; D001175:Arthrography / Q000379:methods*; D001185:Artificial Intelligence; D002574:Cervical Vertebrae / Q000000981:diagnostic imaging*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D010363:Pattern Recognition, Automated / Q000379:methods*; D011856:Radiographic Image Enhancement / Q000379:methods; D011857:Radiographic Image Interpretation, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods*; D016059:Range of Motion, Articular; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012680:Sensitivity and Specificity; D021801:Zygapophyseal Joint