Dual active contours model for HR-pQCT cortical bone segmentation
Mohamed Hafri, Rachid Jennane, Éric Lespessailles, Hechmi Toumi · 2016
The segmentation of the bone in HR-pQCT (High Resolution peripheral Quantitative Computed Tomography) images remains a challenging task due to the image characteristics and the complex structure of the bone (cortical and trabecular). In this paper, we address the problem of separating the cortical bone from the background and the trabecular bone. We propose a novel approach to segment the cortical bone using dual active contours. This new concept allows the two contours to interact with each other and evolve to delineate the cortical bone. The energy of the two contours is based on the local information along the curve to be able to handle the intensity inhomogeneity, the noise characteristics and the motion artefacts in such images. Unlike state of art methods, the proposed technique can segment accurately the cortical bone in the different sites (proximal and ultra-distal). Finally, to test the robustness and accuracy of our proposed method, we compared the computed segmentation results of each method to the ground truth. Our proposed approach gives a higher Dice similarity coefficient in both proximal and ultra-distal sites.