DEGENERATIVE DISC SEGMENTATION AND DIAGNOSIS TECHNOLOGY USING IMPORTANT FEATURES FROM MRI OF SPINE IN IMAGES

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on the medical imaging segmentation techniques which are used in the study of spine diseases. In the medical reports, it is shown that common people worry more about the spine diseases caused by the disc degeneration. Because of the complex composition of the spine, which includes the spine bones, cartilage, fat, water and soft tissue, it is hard to correctly and easily find out the position of each cartilage in the spine images. This above problem always causes over-segmentation or unability to extract the cartilages. Thus, we propose an accurate and automated method to detect the abnormal disc. We combine two standard models with the threshold value to accurately identify the cartilage. Among the processing, we also solve the noising problems of spine image through morphological methods, removing the noncartilage areas using our proposed method, and find out the average height of the cartilages. Therefore, we can easily determine whether the disc is degenerated or not. In the experimental result, the segmentation accuracy of the extracted region by the proposed approach is evaluated by two criterions. The first criterion is statistical evaluation indices of image segmentation. It is evaluated by professional physician's manual segmentation, and the results show that our proposed method is easily implemented and has high accuracy, with the highest rate reaching 99.88%. The second criterion is a comparison evaluation index evaluated by our proposed system and other existence system. From this result, we know that our proposed system is better than other existence system.