Segmentation Of Ribs In Thoracic Ct Scans

Abstract

This paper deals with rib segmentation in thoracic CT data. For the segmentation method of rib centerlines detection is chosen. The first step of this approach is to extract the centerlines of all the bones located in the scan. These centerlines are divided into short primitives, which are subsequently classified into couple of categories, depending on whether they represent the centerline of the rib. More than 95% of all primitives are classified correctly. In the last step, the rib centrelines are used as the seed points of the region growing algorithm in three-dimensional space.