3D Vertebrae Measurements: Assessing Vertebral Dimensions in Human Spine Models Using Automated Landmark Detection

Vertebral morphological measurements are important across various disciplines, including spinal biomechanics, clinical applications both pre- and post-operatively, and an-thropological longitudinal studies, where spinal metrics are repeatedly documented over extended periods. Traditionally, such measurements have been manually conducted, a process that is time-consuming. In this study, we introduce a novel, fully automated method for measuring vertebral morphology using 3D meshes of lumbar and thoracic spine models. A total of 9 morphometric features and 10 landmarks were identified based on our method. The experimental results demonstrate the method's capability to accurately measure low-resolution patient-specific vertebral meshes with mean absolute error (MAE) of 1.09 mm and those derived from artificially created lumbar spines, where the average MAE value was 0.69 mm. Our qualitative analysis indicates that the landmarks detected by our method, used for measurements on 3D spine mod-els, can be accurately reprojected onto the original medical images, provided these images are available.