suppl/3_vertebralbodies.md

Truncation to Vertebral Bodies

To exclude the vertebral arch and spinous processes from the vertebrae's segmentation, we performed these steps:

• Spinal Cord Label: Combined labels originating from or generated by TotalSegmentator and generated by Body-and-Organ-Analysis to create a single label for the spinal cord.
• Label Reduction: Limited vertebral labels to the voxels located anterior to the spinal cord label.
• 3D Area Isolation: Retained only the largest 3D-connected area for each label, removing extraneous voxels.
• Hole Filling: Filled any holes (unassigned voxels completely surrounded by voxels of a single label).
• Smoothing: Applied a smoothing algorithm to refine the edges of the labels.

The script used for this process can be found in 4_MaskEdits.py. The resulting labels were then manually reviewed and corrected as needed.