Abstract
Manual determination of an oblique sagittal imaging plane with high accuracy in lumbar spine magnetic resonance imaging(MRI)needs time, experience and expertise. In this paper we present a simple and fast setting system for assisting MRI operators in their routine work to automatically and accurately determine oblique sagittal imaging plane in lumbar spine MRI. The algorithm of the presented method consists of three major steps:(1)extraction of torso region from coronal localizer image by use of histogram analysis,(2)extraction of lumbar vertebra and spinal canal regions by use of minimization and maximization filters as well as density accumulation analysis, and(3)determination of the desired position and angle of sagittal imaging plane using Hough transform. In order to evaluate the performance of our proposed method, positions and angles of the sagittal imaging planes determined by the presented method were evaluated by five radiological technologists. Thirty healthy volunteers participated in this study. All the 5 observers confirmed that the automatically determined imaging planes of all the 30 cases were acceptable for subsequent imaging procedures.
