# Automatic Segmentation, Localization, and Identification of Vertebrae in 3D CT Images Using Cascaded Convolutional Neural Networks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.13798 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.13798/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 Sep 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Lumbar spine segmentation in MR images: a dataset and a public benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.12217/) (2023)
- [Visual Grounding of Whole Radiology Reports for 3D CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.04794/) (2023)
- [Vertebrae localization, segmentation and identification using a graph optimization and an anatomic consistency cycle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.12177/) (2021)
- [Interpretable Vertebral Fracture Quantification via Anchor-Free Landmarks Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06818/) (2022)
- [Multi-View Vertebra Localization and Identification from CT Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.12845/) (2023)
- [SLoRD: Structural Low-Rank Descriptors for Shape Consistency in Vertebrae Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08555/) (2024)
- [Frequency-enhanced Multi-granularity Context Network for Efficient Vertebrae Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23086/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper presents a method for automatic segmentation, localization, and identification of vertebrae in arbitrary 3D CT images. Many previous works do not perform the three tasks simultaneously even though requiring a priori knowledge of which part of the anatomy is visible in the 3D CT images. Our method tackles all these tasks in a single multi-stage framework without any assumptions. In the first stage, we train a 3D Fully Convolutional Networks to find the bounding boxes of the cervical, thoracic, and lumbar vertebrae. In the second stage, we train an iterative 3D Fully Convolutional Networks to segment individual vertebrae in the bounding box. The input to the second networks have an auxiliary channel in addition to the 3D CT images. Given the segmented vertebra regions in the auxiliary channel, the networks output the next vertebra. The proposed method is evaluated in terms of segmentation, localization, and identification accuracy with two public datasets of 15 3D CT images from the MICCAI CSI 2014 workshop challenge and 302 3D CT images with various pathologies introduced in [1]. Our method achieved a mean Dice score of 96%, a mean localization error of 8.3 mm, and a mean identification rate of 84%. In summary, our method achieved better performance than all existing works in all the three metrics.