Discrimination of Cervical Spine Disorders Based on Cervical Lordosises in Videofluorography During Swallowing

We attempt to elucidate swallowing disorders on the basis of a relation between swallowing and the motion of cervical spines. In our previous paper, we proposed a tracking method of cervical vertebral bodies and spinous processes in videofluorography images by use of template matching technique. In the present paper, these cervical structures are tracked by using the previous method for two seconds during swallowing, and it is shown that there are differences in their movement characteristics between a cervical spine disorder group and a normal group. In addition, we propose a discrimination method of cervical spine disorders based on the analysis of movement characteristics. The area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.746 in twenty‒six samples.