Automated cement segmentation in vertebroplasty based on active contours without edges

In this work we present a method for automatic segmentation and tracking of bone cement during vertebroplasty surgical procedures, as a first step towards building a warning system to avoid cement leakage outside the vertebral body We show that using a level set active contour segmentation algorithm the shape of the injected cement can be accurately detected. We have applied the method on a set of real intra-operative X-ray images and our results show that the algorithm can successfully detect different shapes with blurred and not well defined boundaries, where the classical active contours segmentation is not applicable.