Estimation of vocal fold plane in 3D CT images for diagnosis of vocal fold abnormalities

Vocal folds are the key body structures that are responsible for phonation and regulating air movement into and out of lungs. Various vocal fold disorders may seriously impact the quality of life. When diagnosing vocal fold disorders, CT of the neck is the commonly used imaging method. However, vocal folds do not align with the normal axial plane of a neck and the plane containing vocal cords and arytenoids does vary during phonation. It is therefore important to generate an algorithm for detecting the actual plane containing vocal folds. In this paper, we propose a method to automatically estimate the vocal fold plane using vertebral column and anterior commissure localization. Gray-level thresholding, connected component analysis, rule based segmentation and unsupervised k-means clustering were used in the proposed algorithm. The anterior commissure segmentation method achieved an accuracy of 85%, a good estimate of the expert assessment.