Abstract #3535

Planar Hip Cartilage Quality Maps a Novel Approach to 3D Cartilage Assessment by Combining DGEMRIC with Automated Segmentation

Carl Siversson¹,², Alireza Akhondi-Asl¹, Young-Jo Kim³, Simon K. Warfield¹

¹Computational Radiology Laboratory, Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States; ²Dept. of Medical Radiation Physics, Lund University, Malmo, Sweden; ³Department of Orthopaedics, Children's Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, United States

Delayed Gadolinium enhanced MRI of cartilage (dGEMRIC) is a technique for assessing cartilage quality using T1 quantification. In this work it is shown that by combining an isotropic 3D T1 map with an isotropic 3D TrueFISP image it is both feasible and robust to apply fully automated cartilage segmentation to hip-dGEMRIC data. It is also shown that it is possible to apply cartographic algorithms to the segmented cartilage, generating planar T1 maps covering the entire cartilage surface. Such planar maps are very suitable for studying patterns of cartilage degeneration.