Spine and Individual Vertebrae Segmentation in Computed Tomography Images Using Geometric Flows and Shape Priors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The surgical treatment of injuries to the spine often requires the placement of pedicle screws. To prevent damage to nearby blood vessels and nerves, the individual vertebrae and their surrounding tissue must be precisely localized. To aid surgical planning in this context we present a clinically applicable geometric flow based method to segment the human spinal column from computed tomography (CT) scans. We first apply anisotropic diffusion and flux computation to mitigate the effects of region inhomogeneities and partial volume effects at vertebral boundaries in such data. The first pipeline of our segmentation approach uses a region-based geometric flow, requires only a single manually identified seed point to initiate, and runs efficiently on a multi-core central processing unit (CPU). A shape-prior formulation is employed in a separate second pipeline to segment individual vertebrae, using both region and boundary based terms to augment the initial segmentation. We validate our method on four different clinical databases, each of which has a distinct intensity distribution. Our approach obviates the need for manual segmentation, significantly reduces inter- and intra-observer differences, runs in times compatible with use in a clinical workflow, achieves Dice scores that are comparable to the state of the art, and yields precise vertebral surfaces that are well within the acceptable 2 mm mark for surgical interventions.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".