AUTOMATED ESTIMATION OF NECK MOVEMENT ANGLES USING IMAGE PROCESSING TECHNIQUES

Neck and spinal movements are a major area of study relating to causes for pain and injury. Kinetic behaviour of the vertebral segments form an important aspect of biomechanics. Most of these studies concentrate on neck flexion, extension and translation. These studies are useful in applications that model complicated child births by monitoring the head and neck movement of the baby. Image Processing techniques accompanied by coordinate geometry yields promising results in estimating these movements. In our study, manual entry of data is replaced by automated selection of pixels based on the chosen region of interest (ROI). The primarily used image processing concepts involve ROI based processing and edge detection. The results show better accuracy with automated selection of pixel points and the error rate is quite low. The difference between manual and automated measurements is 5.55% for neck flexion angle and about 14% for the neck extension angle.