Recognizing asymmetric moire patterns for human spinal deformity detection

Recently, the number of techniques for analyzing medical images has been increasing in computer vision, employing X-ray CT images, ultrasound images, MR images, moire topographic images, etc. Spinal deformity is a serious problem especially for teenagers and medical doctors inspect moire topographic images of their backs visually for the primary screening. If a subject is normal, the moire image is almost symmetric with respect to the middle line of the subject's back, otherwise it shows asymmetric shape. In this paper, an image analysis technique is described for discriminating suspicious cases from normal in human spinal deformity by recognizing asymmetric moire images of human backs. The principal axes which are sensitive to asymmetry of the moire image are extracted at two parts on a subject's back and their angles are evaluated with respect to the detected middle line of the back. The two angles compose a 2-D feature space and inspected cases are divided into two clusters in the space by a linear discriminant function based on the Mahalanobis distance. Given 120 cases, 60 normal and 60 abnormal, the leave-out method was applied for the recognition and 75% recognition rate was achieved.