Tissue Segmentation for Three-dimensional Display of Human Spines

This paper presents a morphological tissue segmentation technique for the three-dimensional visualization of the human spine. Magnetic resonance images of the human spine were obtained using motion-compensated fast imaging with steady-state free precession (FISP) pulse sequences. The images acquired with these sequences exhibit very high contrast between the bright cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and the dark spinal cord and nerve roots. This phenomenon has enabled us to apply mathematical morphological processing techniques to extract the spinal nerve roots within the CSF space. The nerve roots were extracted from a set of slices and displayed in a three-dimensional format.