Segmentation of radiographs of cervical spine using level sets

Abstract

This thesis proposes a novel level set segmentation technique to segment medical radiographs of cervical spine. In the past, the level set technique has been used alongside shape information of the target object. To the best of our knowledge, in most methods the curve is evolved towards the boundary using shape information complimented by region based or edge information. However, in many applications like ours, the region based information is non-existent and level set evolution starting from an arbitrary initial curve is difficult.Thus, we propose a method that uses the shape estimate as the initial curve and then evolve it towards the nearest edges in the image. We also present the performance analysis of our approach.