A Segmentation Method Used To Diagnose The Spinal Cord Diseases

A Computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system aimsto facilitate characterization and quantification of abnormalities as well as minimize interpretation errors caused by tedious tasks of image screening and radiologic diagnosis. The system usually consists of segmentation, feature extraction and diagnosis, and segmentation significantly affects the diagnostic performance. In this paper, we propose an automatic segmentation method that extracts the spinal cord and the dural sac from T2- weighted sagittal magnetic resonance (MR) images of lumbar spine without the need of any human intervention. Our method utilizes an Adaptive Fuzzy-K-means Clustering Algorithm for the final segmentation. MR Images from fifty two subjects were employed for our experiments and the segmentation results were quantitatively compared against reference segmentation by two medical specialists in terms of a mutual overlap metric. We plan to apply this segmentation method to computer-aided diagnosis of many lumbar-related pathologies