Segmentation of Bone Structures by Removal of Skin and using a Convex Relaxation Technique

In this paper an algorithm to extract the skin and obtain the segmentation of bones from patients in CT volumes is described. The skin is extracted using an adaptive region growing algorithm followed by morphological operations. The segmentation of bone structures is implemented by the minimization of an energy function and using a convex relaxation minimization algorithm to minimize the energy term. The cost terms in the energy function are computed using the distance between the mean and variance parameters within bone structures in a training set and the mean and variance parameters computed locally at each voxel position (x,y,z) in a test dataset. Several performance metrics have been computed to assess the algorithm. Comparisons with two techniques (thresholding and level sets) have been carried out and the results show that the algorithm proposed clearly outperform both techniques in terms of accuracy in the delimitation results.