Detection of vertebral plateaus in lateral lumbar spinal X-ray images with Gabor filters

A few recent studies have proposed computed-aided methods for the detection and analysis of vertebral bodies in radiographic images. This paper presents a method based on Gabor filters. Forty-one lateral lumbar spinal X-ray images from different patients were included in the study. For each image, a radiologist manually delineated the vertebral plateaus of L1, L2, L3, and L4 using a software tool for image display and mark-up. Each original image was filtered with a bank of 180 Gabor filters. The angle of the Gabor filter with the highest response at each pixel was used to derive a measure of the strength of orientation or alignment. In order to limit the spatial extent of the image data and the derived features in further analysis, a semi-automated procedure was applied to the original image. A neural network utilizing the logistic sigmoid function was trained with pixel intensity from the original image, the result of manual delineation of the plateaus, the Gabor magnitude response, and the alignment image. The average overlap between the results of detection by image processing and manual delineation of the plateaus of L1-L4 in the 41 images tested was 0.917. The results are expected to be useful in the analysis of vertebral deformities and fractures.