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Tracking of Spinal Motion in Video-fluoroscopy
Principle Investigator: Dr. K.-K.Y.Wong
Low back pain is one of the most common health disorders and its cost is enormous.
There is a general consensus that the diagnosis and the treatment of low back pain
can be aided by analysing spinal movement. Thus, spinal measurement techniques have
been studied widely. At present, videofluoroscopic imaging provides an effective
method of obtaining images for spinal motion analysis. Generally, landmarks of a
moving vertebra will be extracted from videofluoroscopic video and will then be
analysed. Landmarks are usually the corners of the moving vertebra and are usually
extracted manually. Unfortunately, the analysis is difficult and time consuming due
to the low quality of the videofluoroscopic images. Thus, automatic extraction of
landmarks is studied in this project.
In this project, a method in which an active contour (or snake) will attach to the
vertebrae automatically throughout the video sequence is proposed. Users only need
to define landmark positions on the first videofluoroscopic image. The active contour
formed from such landmarks will attach to the vertebra automatically in the remaining
video images. This greatly reduces the effort of physicians in setting accurate
landmarks of vertebra manually in every video frame. The reduction in human
intervention means the reduction in error rate due to fatigue of the operator.
Analysis on spinal motion can be done much more effectively and accurately.
