Bone segmentation and 3D visualization of CT images for traumatic pelvic injuries

Pelvic bone segmentation is a vital step in analyzing pelvic CT images, which assists physicians with diagnostic decision making in cases of traumatic pelvic injuries. Due to the limited resolution of the original CT images and the complexity of pelvic structures and their possible fractures, automatic pelvic bone segmentation in multiple CT slices is very difficult. In this study, an automatic pelvic bone segmentation approach is proposed using the combination of anatomical knowledge and computational techniques. It is developed for solving the problem of accurate and efficient bone segmentation using multiple consecutive pelvic CT slices obtained from each patient. Our proposed segmentation method is able to handle variation of bone shapes between slices there by making it less susceptible to inter-personal variability between different patients’ data. Moreover, the designed training models are validated using a crossvalidation process to demonstrate the effectiveness. The algorithm’s capability is tested on a set of 20 CT data sets. Successful segmentation results and quantitative evaluations are present to demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of proposed algorithm, well suited for pelvic bone segmentation purposes. VC 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 24, 29–38, 2014; Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/ima.22076