Automatic segmentation of whole-body bone scintigrams as a preprocessing step for computer assisted diagnostics

  • Authors:

  • Luka Šajn;Matjaž Kukar;Igor Kononenko;Metka Milčinski

  • Affiliations:

  • Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia;Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia;Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia;Department for Nuclear Medicine, University Medical Centre in Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

  • Venue:
  • AIME'05 Proceedings of the 10th conference on Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Bone scintigraphy or whole-body bone scan is one of the most common diagnostic procedures in nuclear medicine used in the last 25 years. Pathological conditions, technically poor quality images and artifacts necessitate that algorithms use sufficient background knowledge of anatomy and spatial relations of bones in order to work satisfactorily. We present a robust knowledge based methodology for detecting reference points of the main skeletal regions that simultaneously processes anterior and posterior whole-body bone scintigrams. Expert knowledge is represented as a set of parameterized rules which are used to support standard image processing algorithms. Our study includes 467 consecutive, non-selected scintigrams, which is to our knowledge the largest number of images ever used in such studies. Automatic analysis of whole-body bone scans using our knowledge based segmentation algorithm gives more accurate and reliable results than previous studies. Obtained reference points are used for automatic segmentation of the skeleton, which is used for automatic (machine learning) or manual (expert physicians) diagnostics. Preliminary experiments show that an expert system based on machine learning closely mimics the results of expert physicians.