Abstract: A method, apparatus, and system for reliably identifying a specific part of a spine in an image of a human or animal body, includes the steps of determining one or more parts of the spine in the image, determining one or more discriminative parameters for each of the one or more parts of the spine in the image, the discriminative parameters relating to at least one anatomical property of each of the one or more parts of the spine, classifying the discriminative parameters of the one or more parts of the spine in the image, and identifying a specific part of the spine based on the classification of the discriminative parameters of the one or more parts of the spine in the image. An identified vertebra, in particular the T12 vertebra and/or its associated intervertebral discs, can be used advantageously as a starting point of powerful automatic spine labeling algorithms.

Abstract: A method and a corresponding apparatus and system localizes a spine in an image, in particular a computed tomography (CT) image, of a human or animal body, allowing for a reduced need for computational power and/or memory on the one hand and assuring a reliable localization of the spine on the other hand. The method includes a) acquiring a plurality of slice images of at least a part of a human or animal body, and b) automatically selecting slice images and/or parts of slice images from the acquired plurality of slice images by considering at least one parameter (?z, ?z, ?z, ?z) characterizing a distribution of bones in the acquired slice images, wherein the selected slice images and/or parts of the slice images includes image information about the spine.