Fully automatic spinal canal segmentation for radiation therapy using a Gradient Vector Flow-based method on computed tomography images: A preliminary study

Nowadays, radiotherapy is one of the key techniques for localized cancer treatment. Accurate identification of target volume (TV) and organs at risk (OAR) is a crucial step to therapy success. Spinal cord is one of the most radiosensitive OAR and its localization tends to be an observer-dependent and time-consuming task. Hence, numerous studies have aimed to carry out the contouring automatically. In CT images, there is a lack of contrast between soft tissues, making more challenge the delineation. That is the reason why the majority of researches have focused on spinal canal segmentation rather than spinal cord. In this work, we propose a fully automated method for spinal canal segmentation using a Gradient Vector Flow-based (GVF) algorithm. An experienced radiologist performed the manual segmentation, generating the ground truth. The method was evaluated on three different patients using the Dice coefficient, obtaining the following results: 79.50%, 83.77%, and 81.88%, respectively. Outcome reveals that more research has to be performed to improve the accuracy of the method.