Automatic Segmentation of Intervertebral Disk from MR Images of the Spine Based on Graph Cut Method

In this study a fully automatic segmentation ofintervertebral disk method based on graph cut (GC) algorithm ispresented. In graph cut algorithm, a graph is constructed fromimage pixels and two additional nodes named source (s) and sink(t). GC algorithm requires some seed points for initialization.Presented method extracts several features from training imagesand uses them to automate GC algorithm. Post-processingoperation like morphological and content-based refinement isapplied to segmented image by GC to get desire ROI. The resultof intervertebral disk segmentation with this method shows 95%accuracy.

Keywords:

image segmentation , intervertebral disk , Graph cut MRI