Abstract #1612

Automatic Quantification of 3D Morphology and Appearance of Intervertebral Discs in High Resolution MRI

Ale Neubert¹,², Jurgen Fripp¹, Craig Engstrom³, Duncan Walker⁴, Raphael Schwarz⁵, Stuart Crozier⁶

¹The Australian E-Health Research Centre, CSIRO ICT Centre, Brisbane, QLD, Australia; ²School of ITEE, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia; ³School of HMS, University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia; ⁴Wesley Hospital, Brisbane, QLD, Australia; ⁵Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany; ⁶School of ITEE, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia

High resolution MRI of the spine provides new possibilities for automatic quantification of intervertebral discs (IVDs) morphology and appearance. Discriminative features (planar measurements, features extracted from 3D statistical shape models of lumbar IVDs and from IVDs histograms) were evaluated on a dataset containing IVDs showing early and advanced stages of degeneration. 3D shape features showed some advantages over planar morphological features for detection of early degenerative changes while IVDs in advanced stages of degeneration were best described by features based on signal intensity.