Automatic localization of vertebrae based on convolutional neural networks

Localization of the vertebrae is of importance in many medical applications. For example, the vertebrae can serve as the landmarks in image registration. They can also provide a reference coordinate system to facilitate the localization of other organs in the chest. In this paper, we propose a new vertebrae localization method using convolutional neural networks (CNN). The main advantage of the proposed method is the removal of hand-crafted features. We construct two training sets to train two CNNs that share the same architecture. One is used to distinguish the vertebrae from other tissues in the chest, and the other is aimed at detecting the centers of the vertebrae. The architecture contains two convolutional layers, both of which are followed by a max-pooling layer. Then the output feature vector from the maxpooling layer is fed into a multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier which has one hidden layer. Experiments were performed on ten chest CT images. We used leave-one-out strategy to train and test the proposed method. Quantitative comparison between the predict centers and ground truth shows that our convolutional neural networks can achieve promising localization accuracy without hand-crafted features.