Automatic lumbar vertebrae segmentation in fluoroscopic images via optimised concurrent Hough transform

We show how a new approach can automatically detect the positions and borders of vertebrae concurrently, relieving many of the problems experienced in other approaches. First, we use phase congruency to relieve the difficulty associated with threshold selection in edge detection of the illumination variant DVF images. Then, our new Hough transform approach is applied to determine the moving vertebrae, concurrently. We include optimisation via a genetic algorithm (as without it the extraction of moving multiple vertebrae is computationally daunting). Our results show that this new approach can indeed provide extractions of position and rotation which appear to be of sufficient quality to aid therapy and diagnosis of spinal disorders.