Orientation correction for chest images

Abstract

This report presents an automatic procedure that determines the orientation of computed radiography (CR) chest images and rotates them to a standard position to be viewed by radiologists. As an input, CR images of a normalized size of 1,000 x 1,000 or 2,000 x 2,000 pixels are used. The analysis is performed in three steps. First, the orientation of the spine within the image is determined. Then, a function searches for upper extremities and the subdiaphragm. Finally, the lungs are extracted and their areas are compared. This indicates whether the image needs to be y-axis flipped. These three steps set the value of three parameters on the basis of which the final rotation angle is determined. The procedure has been implemented in the clinics at UCLA. The rate of correctly rotated images is 95.4%.