Rule and Neural Network-Based Image Segmentation of Mice Vertebrae Images

Background Image segmentation is a fundamental technique that allows researchers to process images from various sources into individual components for certain applications, such as visual or numerical evaluations. Image segmentation is beneficial when studying medical images for healthcare purposes. However, existing semantic image segmentation models like the U-net are computationally intensive. This work aimed to develop less complicated models that could still accurately segment images. Methodology Rule-based and linear layer neural network models were developed in Mathematica and trained on mouse vertebrae micro-computed tomography scans. These models were tasked with segmenting the cortical shell from the whole bone image. A U-net model was also set up for comparison. Results It was found that the linear layer neural network had comparable accuracy to the U-net model in segmenting the mice vertebrae scans. Conclusions This work provides two separate models that allow for automated segmentation of mouse vertebral scans, which could be potentially valuable in applications such as pre-processing the murine vertebral scans for further evaluations of the effect of drug treatment on bone micro-architecture.