Automatic segmentation of the articular cartilage in knee MRI using a hierarchical multi-class classification scheme

Osteoarthritis is characterized by the degeneration of the articular cartilage in joints. We have developed a fully automatic method for segmenting the articular cartilage in knee MR scans based on supervised learning. A binary approximate kNN classifier first roughly separates cartilage from background voxels, then a three-class classifier assigns one of three classes to each voxel that is classified as cartilage by the binary classifier. The resulting sensitivity and specificity are 90.0% and 99.8% respectively for the medial cartilage compartments. We show that an accurate automatic cartilage segmentation is achievable using a low-field MR scanner.