Automatic knee cartilage segmentation from multi-contrast MR images using support vector machine classification with spatial dependencies

Accurate segmentation of knee cartilage is required to obtain quantitative cartilage measurements, which is crucial for the assessment of knee pathology caused by musculoskeletal diseases or sudden injuries. This paper presents an automatic knee cartilage segmentation technique which exploits a rich set of image features from multi-contrast magnetic resonance (MR) images and the spatial dependencies between neighbouring voxels. The image features and the spatial dependencies are modelled into a support vector machine (SVM)-based association potential and a discriminative random field (DRF)-based interaction potential. Subsequently, both potentials are incorporated into an inference graphical model such that the knee cartilage segmentation is cast into an optimal labelling problem which can be efficiently solved by loopy belief propagation. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is validated on a database of multi-contrast MR images. The experimental results show that using diverse forms of image and anatomical structure information as the features are helpful in improving the segmentation, and the joint SVM-DRF model is superior to the classification models based solely on DRF or SVM in terms of accuracy when the same features are used. The developed segmentation technique achieves good performance compared with gold standard segmentations and obtained higher average DSC values than the state-of-the-art automatic cartilage segmentation studies.