Automatic Measurement of Spinous Process Angle on Ultrasound Spinal Column Image

Abstract

Adolescent Idiopathic Scoliosis (AIS) is scoliosis that affects adolescents. Recently, ultrasound and Spinous Process Angle (SPA) have been a method to detect AIS. This study took images of 7 different subjects. During pre-processing process, the image quality was improved using CLAHE, Median Filter. The polynomial regression results are searched for the leftmost or rightmost positions to find the scoliosis curve. Three points are taken on the curve as measurement points from the SPA. This automatic result is compared with the gradient vector flow. The results were then evaluated using Pearson's Correlation by comparing the obtained SPA with Cobb Angle. The result for manual SPA is 0.2 and 0.25 for automatic SPA. These two results were compared resulting in Pearson's Correlation of -0.15. The automatic measurement system on ultrasound images can be an alternative to measuring the angle of scoliosis in the future.