Multi-echo pattern based cartilage segmentation for OA early diagnosis

초록

It is very important to visualize the articular cartilage in diagnosing OA (osteoarthritis). In general, the cartilage evaluation is performed by signal intensity, signal contrast and T2 values based on a single echo MR images or the multi-echo MR images. However, the cartilage segmentation results only based on T2 value may not be suitable for diagnosis of OA (Fig.1 (a)). This paper proposes a new cartilage segmentation method using spectral feature matching in the multi-echo MR Images for early diagnosis of OA. The VTK (Visualization ToolKit) based 3D visualization tool developed for displaying the detected cartilage volume.