Segmentation of pelvic bone structures and automated calculation of pelvic angles

Pelvic bone structure is the fundamental part of our skeletal system and the accuracy of radiological and orthopaedical evaluation of this system is very important. Asetabulum angles are used for the evaluation of this structure and the diagnosing and treatment phases of Pelvic bone diseases. In this study, both a new medical angle measurement method is defined and a new fully automated angle measurement method for this medical method is developed. This automated method consists of two parts as the segmentation of Pelvic bone structure and the automated measurement for Pelvic angles. The fully automated segmentation method for Obturator Foramen is developed with the integrated usage of the Marker-based Watershed segmentation method and Zernike moment feature descriptor for Pelvic bone structure segmentation. The second part of this study is the automated measurement of the Asetabulum angles. In this study, the Asetabulum angles are measured both with the traditional method by clinicians and by the automated method for the healty patients and then the normal medical measurements are extracted separately. Also, the angle measurement results are obtained by using two angle measurement methods for patients which have hip dysplasia for adults and children The first part of the proposed angle measurement method which is the segmentation of Obturator foramen is tested on 100 Pelvic X-ray image and the segmentation accuracy is obtained %96. Also, the evaluation of the automated angle measurement method is performed by statistically and p >0.005 value is obtained between the manual angle measurements and the results of the automated angle measurement method for each angle measurement. Therefore, there isn't any significant difference between the manual angle measurements and the automated angle measurement method. As a result of this study, a new fully automated angle measurement method is developed for accurate diagnosing and treatment of different Pelvic bone diseases by clinicians.