Model-based 3D segmentation of the bones of joints in medical images

There are several medical application areas that require the segmentation and separation of the component bones of joints in a sequence of acquired images of the joint under various loading conditions, our own target area being joint motion analysis. This is a challenging problem due to the proximity of bones at the joint, partial volume effects, and other imaging modality-specific factors that confound boundary contrast. A model-based strategy is proposed in this paper wherein a rigid model of the bone is generated from a segmentation of the bone in the image corresponding to one position of the joint by using the live wire method. In other images of the joint, this model is used to search for the same bone by minimizing an energy functional that utilizes both boundary- and region-based information. An evaluation of the method by utilizing a total of 60 data sets on MR and CT images of the ankle complex and cervical spine indicates that the segmentations agree very closely with the live wire segmentations yielding true positive and false positive volume fractions in the range 89-97% and 0.2-0.7%. The method requires 1-2 minutes of operator time and 6-7 minutes of computer time, which makes it significantly more efficient than live wire -- the only method currently available for the task.