View article

Accurate localization and identification of vertebrae in spinal imaging is crucial for the clinical tasks of diagnosis, surgical planning, and post-operative assessment. The main difficulties for automatic methods arise from the frequent presence of abnormal spine curvature, small field of view, and image artifacts caused by surgical implants. Many previous methods rely on parametric models of appearance and shape whose performance can substantially degrade for pathological cases.

We propose a robust localization and identification algorithm which builds upon supervised classification forests and avoids an explicit parametric model of appearance. We overcome the tedious requirement for dense annotations by a semi-automatic labeling strategy. Sparse centroid annotations are transformed into dense probabilistic labels which capture the inherent identification uncertainty. Using the dense labels …