The present invention relates to detection of bone lesions in medical images, and more particularly, to automatic detection and volumetric quantification of spinal bone lesions in 3D medical images.
Detection and volumetric quantification of spinal bone lesions is important in the treatment of metastizing cancer. Spinal bone lesions may cause debilitating pain, pathologic fractures, and spinal cord compression with sever neurological impairment. In addition to assessing risks of certain courses of the disease, detection and volumetric quantification of bone lesions is important for accurate quantification of disease progression or response to therapy. However, reading an manually identifying and volumetrically measuring, i.e. annotating, spinal bone lesions from 3D computed tomography (CT) data is a challenging and labor intensive task, even for expert radiologists. Further, there may be significant inter- and intra-user variability among manual bone lesion annotations. Accordingly, automated detection and volumetric quantification of spinal bone lesions is desirable.