Hyeun A Kim  Hyeonjin Kim  Han Sang Lee  Helen Hong

knee MRI femoral cartilage segmentation femur segmentation locally-weighted voting multi-atlas segmentation

In this paper, we propose an automated segmentation method of femoral cartilage in knee MR images using multi-atlas-based locally-weighted voting. The proposed method involves two steps. First, to utilize the shape information to show that the femoral cartilage is attached to a femur, the femur is segmented via volume and object-based locally-weighted voting and narrow-band region growing. Second, the object-based affine transformation of the femur is applied to the registration of femoral cartilage, and the femoral cartilage is segmented via multi-atlas shape-based locally-weighted voting. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we compared the segmentation results of majority voting method, intensity-based locally-weighted voting method, and the proposed method with manual segmentation results defined by expert. In our experimental results, the newly proposed method avoids a leakage into the neighboring regions having similar intensity of femoral cartilage, and shows improved segmentation accuracy.