Related Experiment Video
Updated: Apr 17, 2026
In Vivo Quantification of Hip Arthrokinematics during Dynamic Weight-bearing Activities using Dual Fluoroscopy
Published on: July 2, 2021
Automated analysis of hip joint cartilage combining MR T2 and three-dimensional fast-spin-echo images
Shekhar S Chandra1, Rachel Surowiec2, Charles Ho2
1School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland, Australia.
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 (∼ 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 × 2|A∩M|/[|A|+|M|]). 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.
