Detection of bone disease by hybrid SST-watershed x-ray image segmentation

Detection of diagnostic features from X-ray images is favorable due to the low cost of these images. Accurate detection of the bone metastasis region greatly assists physicians to monitor the treatment and to remove the cancerous tissue by surgery. A hybrid SST-watershed algorithm, here, efficiently detects the boundary of the diseased regions. Shortest Spanning Tree (SST), based on graph theory, is one of the most powerful tools in grey level image segmentation. The method converts the images into arbitrary-shape closed segments of distinct grey levels. To do that, the image is initially mapped to a tree. Then using RSST algorithm the image is segmented to a certain number of arbitrary-shaped regions. However, in fine segmentation, over-segmentation causes loss of objects of interest. In coarse segmentation, on the other hand, SST-based method suffers from merging the regions belonged to different objects. By applying watershed algorithm, the large segments are divided into the smaller regions based on the number of catchment's basins for each segment. The process exploits bi-level watershed concept to separate each multi-lobe region into a number of areas each corresponding to an object (in our case a cancerous region of the bone,) disregarding their homogeneity in grey level.