Extraction of spinal candidate region from a dental MR imaging

In recent years, dysphagia is problem among elderly people. Therefore, it is necessary to accurately evaluate swallowing function in order to prevent swallowing disorder beforehand or to detect it early, and it is considered that evaluation of swallowing function using MRI is useful, and the demand for development of CAD system using MRI is increasing. In order to accurately analyze the swallowing motion, automatic extraction of the region of interest by the image analysis method is necessary. In this paper, as a pretreatment of a method for automatic extraction of esophageal region on dental MR image, we develop automatic extraction method of spinal candidate region. We first extract the posterior region of the spine and then extract the intervertebral disc region. Then we perform the detection of the anterior region of the spine and finally we extract the region between the anterior region of the spine and the posterior region of the spine as a spinal region. The proposed method was applied to 5 cases of dental MR images, and the results of TP 91.2 [%] and FP 8.8 [%] are obtained.