Zhou X, Hayashi T, Chen H, Hara T, Yokoyama R, Kanematsu M, Hoshi H, Fujita H
Department of Intelligent Image Information, Division of Regeneration and Advanced Medical Sciences, Graduate School of Medicine, Gifu University, Yanagido 1-1, Gifu 501-1194, Japan.
Annu Int Conf IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2009;2009:3573-6. doi: 10.1109/IEMBS.2009.5334143.
Bone is one of the most important anatomical structures in humans and osteoporosis is one of the major public health concerns in the world. Osteoporosis is a main target disease of bone, which can be detected by medical image techniques. The purpose of this study is to develop a fully automated computer scheme to measure bone-mineral-density (BMD) values for vertebral trabecular bones. This scheme will aid osteoporosis diagnosis performed using computer tomography (CT) images. This scheme includes the following processing steps: segmentation of the bone region, recognition of the skeletal structures and measurement of the BMD value in vertebral trabecular bone of each vertebral body. The proposed scheme was applied to 20 X-ray torso CT cases to measure the BMD values for vertebral trabecular bones. The experimental results show that the mean and standard deviation of the difference between the BMD values measured by using the proposed method and those measured using a manual segmentation method were 6.93 mg/cm(3) and 6.82 mg/cm(3) respectively. The accuracy of the proposed scheme satisfied the requirement for a computer-aided system used in osteoporosis diagnosis.
骨骼是人体最重要的解剖结构之一，骨质疏松症是全球主要的公共卫生问题之一。骨质疏松症是骨骼的主要目标疾病，可通过医学影像技术检测出来。本研究的目的是开发一种全自动计算机方案，用于测量椎骨小梁骨的骨密度（BMD）值。该方案将有助于使用计算机断层扫描（CT）图像进行骨质疏松症诊断。该方案包括以下处理步骤：骨区域分割、骨骼结构识别以及每个椎体椎骨小梁骨中BMD值的测量。将所提出的方案应用于20例X射线躯干CT病例，以测量椎骨小梁骨的BMD值。实验结果表明，使用所提出方法测量的BMD值与使用手动分割方法测量的BMD值之间差异的平均值和标准差分别为6.93mg/cm³和6.82mg/cm³。所提出方案的准确性满足了用于骨质疏松症诊断的计算机辅助系统的要求。
