Scoliosis is a highly prevalent spine deformity that has traditionally been diagnosed through measurement of the Cobb
angle on radiographs. More recent technology such as the commercial EOS imaging system, although more accurate, also
require manual intervention for selecting the extremes of the vertebrae forming the Cobb angle. This results in a high
degree of inter and intra observer error in determining the extent of spine deformity. Our primary focus is to eliminate the
need for manual intervention by robustly quantifying the curvature of the spine in three dimensions, making it consistent
across multiple observers. Given the vertebrae centroids, the proposed Vertebrae Sequence Angle (VSA) estimation and
segmentation algorithm finds the largest angle between consecutive pairs of centroids within multiple inflection points on
the curve. To exploit existing clinical diagnostic standards, the algorithm uses a quasi-3-dimensional approach considering
the curvature in the coronal and sagittal projection planes of the spine. Experiments were performed with manuallyannotated
ground-truth classification of publicly available, centroid-annotated CT spine datasets. This was compared with
the results obtained from manual Cobb and Centroid angle estimation methods. Using the VSA, we then automatically
classify the occurrence and the severity of spine curvature based on Lenke’s classification for idiopathic scoliosis. We
observe that the results appear promising with a scoliotic angle lying within ± 9° of the Cobb and Centroid angle, and
vertebrae positions differing by at the most one position. Our system also resulted in perfect classification of scoliotic from
healthy spines with our dataset with six cases.
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