Identification of position and orientation of hand bones from MR images by bone model registration

This paper proposes a system that identifies the position and orientation of hand bones from magnetic resonance (MR) volume images by registration of a bone model. Investigation of the link structure of a human hand requires the measurement of the relative movement of the bones by identifying each bone configuration among a large number of hand poses of the same subject. To save total time in acquiring bone configurations, a three-step process implemented: (1) a bone polygonal mesh is generated for a bone model by manually segmenting the bone region from one of the MR scanning data; (2) the initial configuration of the bone model is set manually; and (3) the bone model is aligned in MR voxel data to maximize the performance indices. Experimental results show the validity of the identified configurations of the bones by the proposed system when compared with manually generated bone mesh configurations.