Vertebral morphological measurements are important across various disciplines, including spinal biomechanics and clinical applications, pre- and post-operatively. These measurements also play a crucial role in anthropological 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.Our 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 0.7 mm. Our qualitative analysis indicates that measurements obtained using our method on 3D spine models can be accurately reprojected back onto the original medical images if these images are available.

翻译：椎骨形态测量在多个学科中具有重要价值，包括脊柱生物力学、临床术前及术后评估等领域。此类测量在人类学纵向研究中同样发挥关键作用——通过长期反复记录脊柱指标以追踪变化趋势。传统上，这些测量依赖人工操作，过程耗时且效率低下。本研究提出了一种基于腰椎与胸椎三维网格模型的全自动椎骨形态测量新方法。实验结果表明，该方法能够精准测量低分辨率患者特异性椎骨网格（平均绝对误差MAE为1.09毫米），以及由人工生成的腰椎模型（平均MAE值为0.7毫米）。定性分析显示，若原始医学影像可用，使用本方法在三维脊柱模型上获得的测量数据可精确重投影至对应影像。