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Lumbar vertebral fractures vary greatly in types and causes and usually result from severe trauma or pathological conditions such as osteoporosis. Lumbar wedge compression fractures are amongst the most common ones where the vertebra is severely compressed forming a wedge shape and causing pain and pressure on the nerve roots and the spine. Since vertebral segmentation is the first step in any automated diagnosis task, we present a fully automated method for robustly localizing and segmenting the vertebrae for preparation of vertebral fracture diagnosis. Our segmentation method consists of five main steps towards the CAD(Computer-Aided Diagnosis) system: 1) Localization of the intervertebral discs. 2) Localization of the vertebral skeleton. 3) Segmentation of the individual vertebra. 4) Detection of the vertebrae center line and 5) Detection of the vertebrae major boundary points. Our segmentation …