Segmentation and extraction of the spinal canal in sagittal MR images
We propose a fully automated spine MRI image segmentation method based on an extension of the multiscale Singularity Index. Without any training on image patches and any user information or annotation, the proposed method relies on the properties of T2 weighted sequencing and the power of the multiscale Singularity Index. Our method detects and extracts the centerline of the human spine and segments the relevant part of the spinal body by combining the filter responses and discarding erroneous candidates for the spinal region. This segmentation step can be critical for further analysis of the spinal region either by a physician or an automated algorithm. Evaluation on a variety of spine images shows that this method achieves results comparable to human segmentations on many challenging instances.