Joint Disease Workshop – Quantitative Automated Musculoskeletal Analysis

In clinical studies of osteoarthritis using magnetic resonance imaging, the placement of the test subject in the scanner tends to vary and this can a ect the outcome of automatic image analysis methods for articular cartilage assessment, particularly in multi-center studies. We have developed an automatic iterative method that corrects for position variations by combining the two steps: shifting the cartilage towards the expected position and performing a voxel classi cation with the normalized position as a feature. By applying this placement adjustment scheme to an automatic knee cartilage segmentation method we show that the inter-scan reproducibility is much improved and is now as good as that of a highly trained radiologist.