Automatic Detection of Cervical Spine Ligaments Origin and Insertion Points.

Creating patient-specific simulation models helps to make customised implant or treatment plans. To create such models, exact locations of the Origin and Insertion Points of the Ligaments (OIPL) are required. Locating these OIPL is usually done manually through a time-consuming procedure.A fast method to detect these OIPL automatically using spine atlas-based segmentation is proposed in this paper. The average detection rate is 96.16% with a standard deviation of 3.45. The required time to detect these points is approximately 5 seconds. The proposed method can be generalised to detect any other important points or features related to a specific vertebra.The method is implemented as an open-source plugin for 3D Slicer. The method and the datasets can be download for free from a public server.