Ying Xia1, 2, Jurgen Fripp2, Shekhar Chandra2, Olivier Salvado2, Raphael Schwarz3, Lars Lauer3, Craig Engstrom4, Stuart Crozier1
1School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia; 2The Australia e-Health Research Centre, CSIRO ICT Centre, Brisbane, Australia; 3Siemens Healthcare, Erlangen, Germany; 4School of Human Movement Studies, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia
Osteoarthritis (OA) is a common disease of the hip joint characterized by changes in structure and degeneration of cartilage tissue. Magnetic Resonance (MR) imaging has been shown to be an ideal modality for OA assessment, providing direct and non-invasive visualization of joint structure. Morphological measurements (volume, thickness and surface area) of the cartilage tissue have been shown to be important in characterizing and monitoring OA progression, which allows the prediction of its subsequent changes and in-time therapeutic treatment before permanent damage has been developed. In this paper, we present validation of our fully automated scheme for the bone segmentation and qualitative bone-cartilage interface (BCI) extraction and initial cartilage segmentation from MR images of the hip joint.