Vertebrae EDGE Detection and Motion Estimation with Polar Signature

This paper describes a new method of segmentation and identification of individual vertebrae in medical images. The final goal of the application is to determine vertebrae motion induced by their movement between two or several positions. For that, X-ray images of the spinal columns are analysed in order to extract vertebrae contours. We present a new image segmentation approach based on a preliminary selection of vertebrae regions. We use these regions information to identify each individual vertebra by its contour. For the edge detection task, we propose a polar signature representation of the contour using the image gradient of each region. After this, we apply an edge closing method exploiting polynomial fitting.