Computing neck-shaft angle of femur for X-ray fracture detection

Abstract

Worldwide, 30%-40% of women and 13% of men suffer from osteoporotic fractures of the bone, particularly the older people. Doctors in the hospitals need to manually inspect a large number of x-ray images to identify the fracture cases. Automated detection of fractures in x-ray images can help to lower the workload of doctors by screening out the easy cases, leaving a small number of difficult cases and the second confirmation to the doctors to examine more closely. To our best knowledge, such a system does not exist as yet. This paper describes a method of measuring the neck-shaft angle of the femur, which is one of the main diagnostic rules that doctors use to determine whether a fracture is present at the femur. Experimental tests performed on test images confirm that the method is accurate in measuring neck-shaft angle and detecting certain types of femur fractures. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.