体幹部X線CT画像における脊柱の正中矢状面を利用した椎体の骨密度と彎曲角度の自動計測法

概要

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The number of patients with osteoporosis is increasing every year in Japan. The bone-mineral-density (BMD) and spinal curvature are two important factors related to the fractures and osteoporosis. Recently, multi-detector-row CT images are widely used in clinical medicine and may have the potential for osteoporosis diagnosis. The development of a computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) system that can support the osteoporosis diagnosis is now required. This study proposes a method that can measure the distributions of BMD in each of vertebral trabecular bones and angles of spinal curvatures automatically on torso CT images. This method extracts the regions of the vertebral bones firstly and then generates a sagittal plane of the human spine. Finally, 4 corner points of each vertebral bone region are identified and used for measuring the BMD distributions and spinal curvatures. This method was applied to 20 CT cases and the results were compared with the gold standard that were generated by a medical expert. The errors of the average value of BMD have the mean value of 6.93 mg/cm3 (std.dev.: 6.82) . The angles have the mean value of 4.62 degrees (std. dev.: 3.23) in thoracic region and 4.40 degrees (std. dev.: 5.08) in abdomen. These results showed a good performance of our purposed method and possibility for supporting the CAD of osteoporosis diagnosis.
医用画像情報学会の論文