Computerized segmentation and diagnostics of whole-body bone scintigrams

Bone scintigraphy or whole-body bone scan is one of the most common diagnostic procedures in nuclear medicine. Since expert physicians evaluate images manually some automated procedure for pathology detection is desired. A robust knowledge based methodology for segmenting body scans into the main skeletal regions is presented. The algorithm is simultaneously applied on anterior and posterior whole-body bone scintigrams. Expert knowledge is represented as a set of parameterized rules, used to support standard image processing algorithms. The segmented bone regions are parameterized with algorithms for classifying patterns so the pathologies can be classified with machine learning algorithms. This approach enables automatic scintigraphy evaluation of pathological changes, thus in addition to detection of point-like high-uptake lesions also other types can be discovered. Our study includes 467 consecutive, non-selected scintigrams. Automatic analysis of whole-body bone scans using our segmentation algorithm gives more accurate and reliable results than previous studies. Preliminary experiments show that our expert system based on machine learning closely mimics the results of expert physicians.