Segmentation of ribs in thoracic CT scans

This thesis deals with design and implementation of an algorithm for segmentation of ribs from thoracic CT data. For the segmentation method of rib centerlines detection is chosen. The first step of this approach is to extract the centerlines of all the bones located in the scan. These centerlines are divided into short primitives, which are subsequently classified into couple of categories, depending on whether they represent the centerline of the rib. Subsequently, the centrelines of ribs are used as the seed points of the region growing algorithm in three-dimensional space, which realizes the final segmentation of the ribs. Within the work, a database of 10 CT scans was manually annotated, which was subsequently used to validate a performance of the proposed segmentation approach. The achieved success rate of primitive classification is 96,7 %, the success rate of rib segmentation (Dice coefficient) is 86,8 %