3D Shape Analysis of Scoliosis

Scoliosis is typically measured in 2D in the coronal plane, although it is a three-dimensional (3D) condition. Our objective in this work is to analyse the 3D geometry of the spine and its relationship to the vertebral canal. To this end, we make three contributions: first, we extract the 3D space curve of the spine automatically from low-resolution whole-body Dixon MRIs and obtain coronal, sagittal and axial projections for various degrees of scoliosis; second, we also extract the vertebral canal as a 3D curve from the MRIs, and examine the relationship between the two 3D curves; and third, we measure the angle of rotation of the spine and examine the correlation between this 3D measurement and the 2D curvature of the coronal projection. For this study, we use 48,384 MRIs from the UK Biobank.