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.
