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Scope of the Workshop

The spine represents both a vital central axis for the musculoskeletal system and a flexible protective shell surrounding the most important neural pathway in the body, the spinal cord. Spine related diseases or conditions are common and cause a huge burden of morbidity and cost to society. Examples include degenerative disc disease, spinal stenosis, scoliosis, osteoporosis, herniated disks, fracture/ ligamentous injury, infection, tumor, and spondyloarthropathy. Treatment varies with the disease entity and the clinical scenario can be nonspecific. Imaging is often required to help make the diagnosis. Frequently obtained studies include plain radiographs, DXA, bone scans, CT, MR, ultrasound and nuclear medicine. Computational methods play a steadily increasing role in improving speed, confidence, and accuracy in reaching a final diagnosis.

Although there has been great progress in the development of computational methods for spine imaging, there are a number of significant challenges in both methodology and clinical applications. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Clinical applications of spine imaging
  • Computer Aided Diagnosis of spine conditions
  • Computer Aided Detection of spine-related diseases
  • Emerging computational imaging techniques for spinal diseases
  • Fast 3D reconstruction of spine
  • Feature extraction, multiscale analysis, pattern recognition
  • Image enhancement of spine imaging
  • Image-guided spine intervention and treatment
  • Multimodal image registration and fusion for spine imaging
  • Novel visualization techniques
  • Segmentation techniques for spine imaging
  • Statistical and geometric modeling for spine and vertebra
  • Spine and vertebra localization

Workshop Program
The workshop program can be found at Workshop Program


Proceedings
All accepted papers will be published in a volume of the Springer Lecture Notes. A best paper will be awarded at the workshop.


Dataset Available
The digital imaging group of London is providing 10 pairs of spinal CT and MRI. Each pair of CT and MR is from same subject. The use of this dataset is optional. Interested authors can submit the request via: http://www.digitalimaginggroup.ca/contact.php .


Additional Publications
Special Journal Issue
Selected papers may be extended and published in a special issue in Computerized Medical Imaging and Graphics (http://www.digitalimaginggroup.ca/members/Shuo/spine_cfp.pdf).

Edited Book
An edited book titled "Computational Methods and Clinical Applications for Spine Imaging" will be published by Springer in 2014. Proposal for book chapters can be submitted to Shuo Li.