Automatic spinal canal detection in lumbar MR images in the sagittal view using dynamic programming

• Introduction to CAD framework for characterizing/diagnosing lumbar spine pathology.
• Proposing dynamic programming-based spinal canal boundary detection algorithm.
• Performance of the algorithm is quantitatively evaluated.

As there is an increasing need for the computer-aided effective management of pathology in lumbar spine, we have developed a computer-aided diagnosis and characterization framework using lumbar spine MRI that provides radiologists a second opinion. In this paper, we propose a left spinal canal boundary extraction method, based on dynamic programming in lumbar spine MRI. Our method fuses the absolute intensity difference of T1-weighted and T2-weighted sagittal images and the inverted gradient of the difference image into a dynamic programming scheme and works in a fully automatic fashion. The boundaries generated by our method are compared against reference boundaries in terms of the Euclidean distance and the Chebyshev distance. The experimental results from 85 clinical data show that our methods find the boundary with a mean Euclidean distance of 3 mm, achieving a speedup factor of 167 compared with manual landmark extraction. The proposed method successfully extracts landmarks automatically and fits well with our framework for computer-aided diagnosis in lumbar spine.