Radiography and Thermography Based Image Processing Techniques for Assessment of Lower Back Pain

Lower back pain (LBP) is a state of ailment where most of the victims suffer pain near the Lumbar spine 1 - Lumbar spine 5. The imaging techniques like X-Ray, CT scans and MRI aid the medical practitioners to visualize the illness better. The radiographic images especially X-ray are widely used for assessment of LBP patients. Repetitive radiography imaging cause harm during long term treatment of LBP. This study involves a image processing based two-way approach of processing X-Ray to quantify intervertebral disc space during initial stage of diagnosis and thermography based image analysis is adopted for long term treatment of LBP patients. The results shows thermography images are useful in localization of the site of pain. The X-ray/CT images useful to diagnose the internal condition of disc space and thermal images could reveal the exterior conditions around the site of the pain in follow up treatments of LBP patients. This proposed image processing based method is combination of two modalities which is useful in treatment procedure and avoids repetitive X-ray/CT imaging of LBP patients.