Automatic vertebral morphometry assessment.

Diagnosis of vertebral deformation and fracture is a key issue in the management of osteoporosis. Vertebral morphometry is the key solution to assess these vertebral deformities, but it is a tedious operation for the rheumatologist. In this paper, we propose an automatic approach to localize vertebrae and determine the vertebral morphometry. Based on a local phase symmetry measure, our approach shows promising results even on poor quality images. This work was tested on 22 scans of conventional lateral X-rays radiographs and compared to the results obtained by a trained radiologist. It resulted to have acceptable low error rates for localization and vertebral morphometry measures, but with a lack of robustness among images. Amelioration is necessary for images with an unoptimized patient positioning, when the X-ray beam is not perpendicular to the spine.