Template-matching-based Tracking of Cervical Spinous Processes in Videofluorography During Swallowing

Abstract

Our previous study revealed that the physiological lordosis of cervical spines was reduced in videofluorography during normal swallowing. In the study, cervical spines were manually extracted in all the frames of videofluorography. Therefore it was difficult to apply this extraction method to the videofluorography of larger dataset. The present paper proposes an automatic tracking method of cervical spinous processes, which are parts of cervical spines, in videofluorography by use of the two-dimensional template matching technique. In the method, cervical spinous processes can be extracted automatically, though templates should be set manually only in the first frame of videofluorography. The automatic tracking method was applied to from C1 to C6 cervical spinous processes in actual videofluorography of three cases, who were planned to undergo posterior cervical spinal fusion. The cervical spinous processes were able to be tracked at the accuracy of more than 85% in Jaccared index. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method was promising as a means of analyzing the motion of cervical spinous processes in videofluorography during swallowing.