Vertebrae Identification and Localization Utilizing Fully Convolutional Networks and a Hidden Markov Model

Automated identification and localization of vertebrae in spinal computed tomography (CT) imaging is a complicated hybrid task. This task requires detecting and indexing a long sequence in a 3-D image, and both image feature extraction and sequence modeling are needed to address the problem. In this paper, the powerful fully convolutional neural network (FCN) technique performs both of these tasks simultaneously because FCNs directly encode and...