Parametric modelling and segmentation of vertebral bodies in 3D CT and MR spine images

Accurate and objective evaluation of vertebral deformations is of significant importance in clinical diagnostics and therapy of pathological conditions affecting the spine. Although modern clinical practice is focused on three-dimensional (3D) computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance (MR) imaging techniques, the established methods for evaluation of vertebral deformations are limited to measuring deformations in two-dimensional (2D) x-ray images. In this paper, we propose a method for quantitative description of vertebral body deformations by efficient modelling and segmentation of vertebral bodies in 3D. The deformations are evaluated from the parameters of a 3D superquadric model, which is initialized as an elliptical cylinder and then gradually deformed by introducing transformations that yield a more detailed representation of the vertebral body shape. After modelling the vertebral body shape with 25 clinically meaningful parameters and the vertebral body pose with six rigid body parameters, the 3D model is aligned to the observed vertebral body in the 3D image. The performance of the method was evaluated on 75 vertebrae from CT and 75 vertebrae from T(2)-weighted MR spine images, extracted from the thoracolumbar part of normal and pathological spines. The results show that the proposed method can be used for 3D segmentation of vertebral bodies in CT and MR images, as the proposed 3D model is able to describe both normal and pathological vertebral body deformations. The method may therefore be used for initialization of whole vertebra segmentation or for quantitative measurement of vertebral body deformations.