Three-Dimensional Vertebrae Reconstruction from Stereoradiography Based on Epipolar Geometry

This paper proposed an approach based on epipolar geometry for three-dimensional (3D) vertebrae reconstruction from two conventional radiographic views (posteroanterior and lateral). The proposed method consisted in detecting the corresponding landmarks and estimating the 3D coordinates of landmarks under the constraint of epipolar geometry. With the 3D landmarks reconstructed as control points, the anatomical primitives were deformed to obtain the personalized vertebral models by using kriging algorithm. The distances between the stereoradiographic and CT-scan reconstruction were calculated to validate the proposed method. It was shown that due to the accurate estimation of 3D landmarks, both the mean and maximum distances under the proposed method were less than those under the traditional direct linear transformation (DLT) reconstruction. This method can therefore be proposed to obtain the 3D geometry of vertebrae from stereoradiography.