Spinal canal and spinal marrow segmentation by means of the hough transform of special classes of curves

In this paper we present a Hough Transform-based method for the detection of the spinal district in X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) images in order to build binary masks that can be applied to functional images to infer information on the metabolic activity of the spinal marrow. This kind of information may be of particular interest for the study of the spinal marrow physiology in both health and disease.