Automated Visualization of Femoral and Acetabular Cartilages In MR Images of the Hip

摘要

Visualization of the hip cartilages is clinically useful for clinicians and orthopedic surgeons. In this research, we propose a multi step technique for segmentation and thickness-map visualization of the femoral and acetabular cartilages based on clinically obtained multi-slice Tl-weighted MR data. We first propose a technique for bone segmentation based on vector quantization technique and femoral head center estimation. Next, we localize the hip joint space center-line by employing anatomical constraint and a customized double thresholding technique. We then segment the hip joint cartilages roughly using a Top-hat filter on first derivative images. We next utilize the articular-space center-line to segment the acetabular and femoral head cartilages. We finally apply a method for thickness measurement based on extermum points found from images enhanced by directional derivative filters. The feasibility of the proposed techniques is evaluated in the presence of 40 hips including 2400 MR images.