Semi-automatic knee cartilage segmentation

Erik B. Dam; Jenny Folkesson; Paola C. Pettersen M.D.; Claus Christiansen M.D.

doi:10.1117/12.653099

15 March 2006 Semi-automatic knee cartilage segmentation

Erik B. Dam, Jenny Folkesson, Paola C. Pettersen M.D., Claus Christiansen M.D.

Proceedings Volume 6144, Medical Imaging 2006: Image Processing; 614441 (2006) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.653099
Event: Medical Imaging, 2006, San Diego, California, United States

Abstract

Osteo-Arthritis (OA) is a very common age-related cause of pain and reduced range of motion. A central effect of OA is wear-down of the articular cartilage that otherwise ensures smooth joint motion. Quantification of the cartilage breakdown is central in monitoring disease progression and therefore cartilage segmentation is required. Recent advances allow automatic cartilage segmentation with high accuracy in most cases. However, the automatic methods still fail in some problematic cases. For clinical studies, even if a few failing cases will be averaged out in the overall results, this reduces the mean accuracy and precision and thereby necessitates larger/longer studies. Since the severe OA cases are often most problematic for the automatic methods, there is even a risk that the quantification will introduce a bias in the results. Therefore, interactive inspection and correction of these problematic cases is desirable. For diagnosis on individuals, this is even more crucial since the diagnosis will otherwise simply fail. We introduce and evaluate a semi-automatic cartilage segmentation method combining an automatic pre-segmentation with an interactive step that allows inspection and correction. The automatic step consists of voxel classification based on supervised learning. The interactive step combines a watershed transformation of the original scan with the posterior probability map from the classification step at sub-voxel precision. We evaluate the method for the task of segmenting the tibial cartilage sheet from low-field magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of knees. The evaluation shows that the combined method allows accurate and highly reproducible correction of the segmentation of even the worst cases in approximately ten minutes of interaction.

Citation Download Citation

Erik B. Dam, Jenny Folkesson, Paola C. Pettersen M.D., and Claus Christiansen M.D. "Semi-automatic knee cartilage segmentation", Proc. SPIE 6144, Medical Imaging 2006: Image Processing, 614441 (15 March 2006); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.653099

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