Automated Analysis of Hip Joint Cartilage Combining MR T2 and Three-Dimensional Fast-Spin-Echo Images

Purpose: To validate a fully automated scheme to extract biochemical information from the hip joint cartilages using MR T2 mapping images incorporating segmentation of co-registered three-dimensional Fast-Spin-Echo (3D-SPACE) images. Methods: Manual analyses of unilateral hip (3 Tesla) MR images of 24 asymptomatic volunteers were used to validate a 3D deformable model method for automated cartilage segmentation of SPACE scans, partitioning of the individual femoral and acetabular cartilage plates into clinically defined sub-regions and propagating these results to T2 maps to calculate region-wise T2 value statistics. Analyses were completed on a desktop computer (similar to 10 min per case). Results: The mean voxel overlap between automated A and manual M segmentations of the cartilage volumes in the (clinically based) SPACE images was 73% (100 x 2 vertical bar A boolean AND M vertical bar/vertical bar vertical bar A vertical bar +vertical bar M vertical bar). The automated and manual analyses demonstrated a relative difference error < 10% in the median "T2 average signal" for each cartilage plate. The automated and manual analyses showed consistent patterns between significant differences in T2 data across the hip cartilage sub-regions. Conclusion: The good agreement between the manual and automatic analyses of T2 values indicates the use of structural 3D-SPACE MR images with the proposed method provides a promising approach for automated quantitative T2 assessment of hip joint cartilages. (C) 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.