A deformable model to segment discontinuous boundaries of bone fractures in X-ray images

Very often, a bone fracture results in discontinuous boundaries between two or more bone structures. It is required to capture such fractures using an imaging technology and subsequently model the fractured locations to detect the accurate physical shape of the fractured region. In this paper, an algorithm is proposed based on active contours, often referred to as snakes, to detect discontinuous boundaries of bone fractures from X-ray images. The proposed technique has the ability to incorporate a prior knowledge of significant corners of the fracture into the deforming contour in order to deform it towards boundaries of the object without surpassing points at discontinuous regions. Experimental results with several X-ray images show the ability of the new technique to extract features of interest with increased accuracy.