Automatic segmentation of wrist bone fracture area by K-means pixel clustering from X-ray image

Abstract

Early detection of subtle fracture is important particularly for the senior citizens’ quality of life. Naked eye examination from X-ray image may cause false negatives due to operator subjectivity thus computer vision based automatic detection software is much needed in practice.  In this paper, we propose an automatic extraction method for suspisious wrist fracture regions. We apply K-means in pixel clustering to form the candidate part of possible fracture from wrist X-ray image automatically. This method can recover previously detected patterned false cases with edge detection method after fuzzy stretching. The proposed method is successful in 16 out of 20 tested cases in experiment.