A fully automatic algorithm for contour detection of bones in hand radiographs using active contours

This paper presents an algorithm for automatically detecting bone contours from hand radiographs using active contours. Prior knowledge is first used to locate initial contours for the snakes inside each bone of interest. Next, an adaptive snake algorithm is applied so that parameters are properly adjusted for each bone specifically. We introduce a novel truncation technique to prevent the external forces of the snake from pulling the contour outside the bones boundaries, yielding excellent results.