Detection of degenerative change in lateral projection cervical spine x-ray images

Degenerative changes to the cervical spine can be accompanied by neck pain, which can result from narrowing of the intervertebral disc space and growth of osteophytes. In a lateral x-ray image of the cervical spine, degenerative changes are characterized by vertebral bodies that have indistinct boundaries and limited spacing between vertebrae. In this paper, we present a machine learning approach to detect and localize degenerative changes in lateral x-ray images of the cervical spine. Starting from a user-supplied set of points in the center of each vertebral body, we fit a central spline, from which a region of interest is extracted and image features are computed. A Random Forest classifier labels regions as degenerative change or normal. Leave-one-out cross-validation studies performed on a dataset of 103 patients demonstrates performance of above 95% accuracy.