A fast method for spine localization in x-ray images

Detection of spines in medical images are important tasks in medical applications. These tasks are relatively easy for CT/MR images because the bones are easily distinguishable from other tissues. However, they are difficult for x-ray images due to bone and soft tissue overlapping. This paper illustrates a method for detecting the medial axis of spine in x-ray images. Given an initial point on the spine in the x-ray image manually or automatically, the method iteratively searches for good feature points on the spine to locate the medial axis. As a result, the effort of determining the relevant medical information, such as Cobb´s angle, can be minimized. The proposed method is fast and efficient. In average it took less than 1 second for localizing the spine on a 3000×1000 gray scale x-ray image.