Fast traumatic brain injury CT slice indexing via anatomical feature classification

Computed tomography (CT) is used widely in traumatic brain injury diagnosis. One axial brain CT scan consists of multiple slices with different heights along the brain axial direction. Indexing of brain CT slices is to order the slices and align each individual slice onto the corresponding brain axial height, which is an important step in content-based image retrieval and computer-assisted diagnosis. Current existing methods for this indexing task are through the image registration techniques by registering 2D image slices onto a 3D brain atlas. In this paper, instead of using the registration methods, we propose a fast indexing method using anatomical feature classification. In our method, the brain CT scan is divided into 6 height levels along the axial direction so that slices in each level share similar anatomical structure. In this way, the indexing problem becomes a classification problem that one series of scan slices are to be classified into 6 classes. Experimental results show that the proposed method is effective and efficient.